The land of little rain

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LITTLE-RAIN

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BANCROFT
LIBRARY

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THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA

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THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN

PETITE PETE (Page 157)

THE LAND

OF

LITTLE R AI N

BY

MARY AUSTIN

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

1903

A bo 7

COPYRIGHT igoj BY MARY AUSTIN
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published October iqO3

I I |: UAUY

TO EVE
"THE COMFORTRESS OF UNSUCCESS"

PREFACE

T CONFESS to a great liking for the
•*• Indian fashion of name-giving: every
man known by that phrase which best ex-
presses him to whoso names him. Thus
he may be Mighty-Hunter, or Man-Afraid-
of-a-Bear, according as he is called by
friend or enemy, and Scar-Face to those
who knew him by the eye's grasp only.
No other fashion, I think, sets so well with
the various natures that inhabit in us, and
if you agree with me you will understand
why so few names are written here as they
appear in the geography. For if I love a
lake known by the name of the man who
discovered it, which endears itself by reason
vii

PREFACE

of the close-locked pines it nourishes about
its borders, you may look in my account to
find it so described. But if the Indians
have been there before me, you shall have
their name, which is always beautifully fit
and does not originate in the poor human
desire for perpetuity.

Nevertheless there are certain peaks, ca-
nons, and clear meadow spaces which are
above all compassing of words, and have a
certain fame as of the nobly great to whom
we give no familiar names. Guided by
these you may reach my country and find
or not find, according as it lieth in you,
much that is set down here. And more.
The earth is no wanton to give up all her
best to every comer, but keeps a sweet,
separate intimacy for each. But if you do
viii

PREFACE

not find it all as I write, think me not less
dependable nor yourself less clever. There
is a sort of pretense allowed in matters of
the heart, as one should say by way of
illustration, " I know a man who . . . ,"
and so give up his dearest experience with-
out betrayal. And I am in no mind to
direct you to delectable places toward
which you will hold yourself less tenderly
than I. So by this fashion of naming I
keep faith with the land and annex to my
own estate a very great territory to which
none has a surer title.

The country where you may have sight
and touch of that which is written lies
between the high Sierras south from Yo-
semite — east and south over a very great
assemblage of broken ranges beyond Death
ix

PREFACE

Valley, and on inimitably into the Mojave
Desert. You may come into the borders
of it from the south by a stage journey that
has the effect of involving a great lapse of
time, or from the north by rail, dropping
out of the overland route at Reno. The
best of all ways is over the Sierra passes
by pack and trail, seeing and believing.
But the real heart and core of the country
are not to be come at in a month's vacation.
One must summer and winter with the land
and wait its occasions. Pine woods that
take two and three seasons to the ripening
of cones, roots that lie by in the sand seven
years awaiting a growing rain, firs that
grow fifty years before flowering, — these
do not scrape acquaintance. But if ever
you come beyond the borders as far as the

PREFACE

town that lies in a hill dimple at the foot
of Kearsarge, never leave it until you have
knocked at the door of the brown house
under the willow-tree at the end of the
village street, and there you shall have
such news of the land, of its trails and
what is astir in them, as one lover of it can
give to another.

XI

NOTE ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS

THE Publishers feel that they have been pecul-
iarly fortunate in securing Mr. E. Boyd Smith
as the illustrator and interpreter of Mrs. Austin's
charming sketches of the " Land of Little Rain."
His familiarity with the region and his rare ar-
tistic skill have enabled him to give the very
atmosphere of the desert, and graphically to por-
tray its life, animal and human. This will be felt
not only in the full-page compositions, but in the
delightful marginal sketches, which are not less
illustrative, although, from their nature, it is im-
practicable to enumerate them in a formal list.

CONTENTS

PAGE

THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN i

WATER TRAILS OF THE CERISO ... 23

THE SCAVENGERS 45

THE POCKET HUNTER . . . . 61

SHOSHONE LAND 81

JIMVILLE — A BRET HARTE TOWN . . 103

MY NEIGHBOR'S FIELD ..... 123

THE MESA TRAIL 141

THE BASKET MAKER . . . . .161

THE STREETS OF THE MOUNTAINS . . 181
WATER BORDERS . . . . . .203

OTHER WATER BORDERS . . . . 223

NURSLINGS OF THE SKY 243

THE LITTLE TOWN OF THE GRAPE VINES . 263

THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN

THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN

EAST away from the Sierras, south
from Panamint and Amargosa, east
and south many an uncounted mile, is the
Country of Lost Borders.

Ute, Paiute, Mojave, and Shoshone in-
habit its frontiers, and as far into the heart
of it as a man dare go. Not the law, but
the land sets the limit. Desert is the name
it wears upon the maps, but the Indian's •

is the better word. Desert is a loose term

v h

to indicate land that supports no man;
whether the land can be bitted and broken
to that purpose is not proven. Void of life
it never is, however dry the air and villain-
ous the soil.

This is the nature of that country.
There are hills, rounded, blunt, burned,
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THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN

squeezed up out of chaos, chrome and ver-
milion painted, aspiring to the snow-line.
Between the hills lie high level-looking
plains full of intolerable sun glare, or nar-
row valleys drowned in a blue haze. The
hill surface is streaked with ash drift and
black, unweathered lava flows. After rains
water accumulates in the hollows of small
closed valleys, and, evaporating, leaves hard
dry levels of pure desertness that get the
local name of dry lakes. Where the moun-
tains are steep and the rains heavy, the pool
is never quite dry, but dark and bitter,
rimmed about with the efflorescence of al-
kaline deposits. A thin crust of it lies along
the marsh over the vegetating area, which
has neither beauty nor freshness. In the
broad wastes open to the wind the sand
drifts in hummocks about the stubby shrubs,
and between them the soil shows saline
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THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN

traces. The sculpture of the hills here is
more wind than water work, though the
quick storms do sometimes scar them past
many a year's redeeming. In all the West-
ern desert edges there are essays in min-
iature at the famed, terrible Grand Canon,
to which, if you keep on long enough in
this country, you will come at last.

Since this is a hill country one expects
to find springs, but not to depend upon
them ; for when found they are often brack-
ish and unwholesome, or maddening, slow
dribbles in a thirsty soil. Here you find
the hot sink of Death Valley, or high roll-
ing districts where the air has always a
tang of frost. Here are the long heavy
winds and breathless calms on the tilted
mesas where dust devils dance, whirling up
into a wide, pale sky. Here you have no
rain when all the earth cries for it, or quick
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THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN

downpours called cloud-bursts for violence.
A land of lost rivers, with little in it to love ;
yet a land that once visited must be come
back to inevitably. If it were not so there
would be little told of it.

This is the country of three seasons.
From June on to November it lies hot,
still, and unbearable, sick with violent
unrelieving storms ; then on until April,
chill, quiescent, drinking its scant rain and
scanter snows ; from April to the hot season
again, blossoming, radiant, and seductive.
These months are only approximate ; later
or earlier the rain-laden wind may drift up
the water gate of the Colorado from the
Gulf, and the land sets its seasons by the
rain.

The desert floras shame us with their
cheerful adaptations to the seasonal limita-
tions. Their whole duty is to flower and
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THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN

fruit, and they do it hardly, or with tropi-
cal luxuriance, as the rain admits. It is
recorded in the report of the Death Valley
expedition that after a year of abundant
rains, on the Colorado desert was found a
specimen of Amaranthus ten feet high. A
year later the same species in the same
place matured in the drought at four
inches. One hopes the land may breed
like qualities in her human offspring, not
tritely to " try," but to do. Seldom does
the desert herb attain the full stature of
the type. Extreme aridity and extreme
altitude have the same dwarfing effect, so
that we find in the high Sierras and in
Death Valley related species in miniature
that reach a comely growth in mean tem-
peratures. Very fertile are the desert plants
in expedients to prevent evaporation, turn-
ing their foliage edgewise toward the sun,
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THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN

growing silky hairs, exuding viscid gum.
The wind, which has a long sweep, harries
and helps them. It rolls up dunes about
the stocky stems, encompassing and pro-
tective, and above the dunes, which may
be, as with the mesquite, three times as
high as a man, the blossoming twigs flour-
ish and bear fruit.

There are many areas in the desert
where drinkable water lies within a few
feet of the surface, indicated by the mes-
quite and the bunch grass (Sporobolus airo-
ides). It is this nearness of unimagined
help that makes the tragedy of desert
deaths. It is related that the final break-
down of that hapless party that gave Death
Valley its forbidding name occurred in a
locality where shallow wells would have
saved them. But how were they to know
that ? Properly equipped it is possible to
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THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN

go safely across that ghastly sink, yet every
year it takes its toll of death, and yet men
find there sun-dried mummies, of whom
no trace or recollection is preserved. To
underestimate one's thirst, to pass a given
landmark to the right or left, to find a dry
spring where one looked for running water
— there is no help for any of these things.
Along springs and sunken watercourses
one is surprised to find such water-loving
plants as grow widely in moist ground, but
the true desert breeds its own kind, each
in its particular habitat. The angle of the
slope, the frontage of a hill, the structure
of the soil determines the plant. South-
looking hills are nearly bare, and the lower
tree-line higher here by a thousand feet.
Canons running east and west will have
one wall naked and one clothed. Around
dry lakes and marshes the herbage pre-
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THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN

serves a set and orderly arrangement. Most
species have well-defined areas of growth,
the best index the voiceless land can give
the traveler of his whereabouts.

If you have any doubt about it, know
that the desert begins with the creosote.
This immortal shrub spreads down into
Death Valley and up to the lower tim-
ber-line, odorous and medicinal as you
might guess from the name, wandlike, with
shining fretted foliage. Its vivid green is
grateful to the eye in a wilderness of gray
and greenish white shrubs. In the spring
it exudes a resinous gum which the In-
dians of those parts know how to use with
pulverized rock for cementing arrow points
to shafts. Trust Indians not to miss any
virtues of the plant world !

Nothing the desert produces expresses
it better than the unhappy growth of the
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tree yuccas. Tormented, thin forests of it
stalk drearily in the high mesas, particu-
larly in that triangular slip that fans out
eastward from the meeting of the Sierras
and coastwise hills where the first swings
across the southern end of the San Joaquin
Valley. The yucca bristles with bayonet-
pointed leaves, dull green, growing shaggy
with age, tipped with panicles of fetid,
greenish bloom. After death, which is
slow, the ghostly hollow network of its
woody skeleton, with hardly power to rot,
makes the moonlight fearful. Before the
yucca has come to flower, while yet its
bloom is a creamy cone-shaped bud of the
size of a small cabbage, full of sugary sap,
the Indians twist it deftly out of its fence
of daggers and roast it for their own delec-
tation. So it is that in those parts where
man inhabits one sees young plants of
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THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN

Yucca arborensis infrequently. Other yuc-
cas, cacti, low herbs, a thousand sorts, one
finds journeying east from the coastwise
hills. There is neither poverty of soil nor
species to account for the sparseness of
desert growth, but simply that each plant
requires more room. So much earth must
be preempted to extract so much moisture.
The real struggle for existence, the real
brain of the plant, is underground ; above
there is room for a rounded perfect growth.
In Death Valley, reputed the very core of
desolation, are nearly two hundred identi-
fied species.

Above the lower tree-line, which is also
the snow-line, mapped out abruptly by the
sun, one finds spreading growth of pinon,
juniper, branched nearly to the ground, lilac
and sage, and scattering white pines.

There is no special preponderance of
12

THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN

self-fertilized or wind-fertilized plants, but
everywhere the demand for and evidence
of insect life. Now where there are seeds
and insects there will be birds and small
mammals, and where these are, will come
the slinking, sharp-toothed kind that prey
on them. Go as far as you dare in the
heart of a lonely land, you cannot go so
far that life and death are not before you.
Painted lizards slip in and out of rock
crevices, and pant on the white hot sands.
Birds, hummingbirds even, nest in the
cactus scrub ; woodpeckers befriend the
demoniac yuccas ; out of the stark, treeless
waste rings the music of the night-singing
mockingbird. If it be summer and the
sun well down, there will be a burrowing
owl to call. Strange, furry, tricksy things
dart across the open places, or sit motion-
less in the conning towers of the creosote.
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THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN

The poet may have " named all the birds
without a gun," but not the fairy-footed,
ground-inhabiting, furtive, small folk of the
rainless regions. They are too many and
too swift ; how many you would not believe
without seeing the footprint tracings in the
sand. They are nearly all night workers,
finding the days too hot and white. In
mid-desert where there are no cattle, there
are no birds of carrion, but if you go far
in that direction the chances are that you
will find yourself shadowed by their tilted
wings. Nothing so large as a man can
move unspied upon in that country, and
they know well how the land deals with
strangers. There are hints to be had here
of the way in which a land forces new hab-
its on its dwellers. The quick increase of
suns at the end of spring sometimes over-
takes birds in their nesting and effects a
14

THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN

reversal of the ordinary manner of incuba-
tion. It becomes necessary to keep eggs
cool rather than warm. One hot, stifling
spring in the Little Antelope I had occa-
sion to pass and repass frequently the nest
of a pair of meadowlarks, located unhap-
pily in the shelter of a very slender weed.
I never caught them sitting except near
night, but at midday they stood, or drooped
above it, half fainting with pitifully parted
bills, between their treasure and the sun.
Sometimes both of them together with
wings spread and half lifted continued a
spot of shade in a temperature that con-
strained me at last in a fellow feeling to
spare them a bit of canvas for permanent
shelter. There was a fence in that country
shutting in a cattle range, and along its
fifteen miles of posts one could be sure
of finding a bird or two in every strip of
15

THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN

shadow ; sometimes the sparrow and the
hawk, with wings trailed and beaks parted,
drooping in the white truce of noon.

If one is inclined to wonder at first how
so many dwellers came to be in the lone-
liest land that ever came out of God's
hands, what they do there and why stay,
one does not wonder so much after having
lived there. None other than this long
brown land lays such a hold on the affec-
tions. The rainbow hills, the tender blu-
ish mists, the luminous radiance of the
spring, have the lotus charm. They trick
the sense of time, so that once inhabiting
there you always mean to go away without
quite realizing that you have not done it.
Men who have lived there, miners and cat-
tle-men, will tell you this, not so fluently,
but emphatically, cursing the land and go-
ing back to it. For one thing there is the
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THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN

divinest, cleanest air to be breathed any-
where in God's world. Some day the
world will understand that, and the little
oases on the windy tops of hills will har-
bor for healing its ailing, house -weary
broods. There is promise there of great
wealth in ores and earths, which is no
wealth by reason of being so far removed
from water and workable conditions, but
men are bewitched by it and tempted to
try the impossible.

You should hear Salty Williams tell how
he used to drive eighteen and twenty-mule
teams from the borax marsh to Mojave,
ninety miles, with the trail wagon full of
water barrels. Hot days the mules would
go so mad for drink that the clank of the
water bucket set them into an uproar of
hideous, maimed noises, and a tangle of
harness chains, while Salty would sit on

THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN

the high seat with the sun glare heavy in
his eyes, dealing out curses of pacification
in a level, uninterested voice until the
clamor fell off from sheer exhaustion.
There was a line of shallow graves along
that road ; they used to count on dropping
a man or two of every new gang of coolies
brought out in the hot season. But when
he lost his swamper, smitten without warn-
ing at the noon halt, Salty quit his job ; he
said it was " too durn hot." The swamper
he buried by the way with stones upon him
to keep the coyotes from digging him up,
and seven years later I read the penciled
lines on the pine headboard, still bright
and unweathered.

But before that, driving up on the

Mojave stage, I met Salty again crossing

Indian Wells, his face from the high seat,

tanned and ruddy as a harvest moon, lobm-

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THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN

ing through the golden dust above his eigh-
teen mules. The land had called him.

The palpable sense of mystery in the
desert air breeds fables, chiefly of lost trea-
sure. Somewhere within its stark borders,
if one believes report, is a hill strewn with
nuggets ; one seamed with virgin silver ;
an old clayey water-bed where Indians
scooped up earth to make cooking pots
and shaped them reeking with grains of
pure gold. Old miners drifting about the
desert edges, weathered into the semblance
of the tawny hills, will tell you tales like
these convincingly. After a little sojourn
in that land you will believe them on their
own account. It is a question whether it
is not better to be bitten by the little horned
snake of the desert that goes sidewise and
strikes without coiling, than by the tradition
of a lost mine.

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THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN

And yet — and yet — is it not perhaps
to satisfy expectation that one falls into the
tragic key in writing of desertness ? The
more you wish of it the more you get, and
in the mean time lose much of pleasantness.
In that country which begins at the foot of
the east slope of the Sierras and spreads
out by less and less lofty hill ranges toward
the Great Basin, it is possible to live with
great zest, to have red blood and delicate
joys, to pass and repass about one's daily
performance an area that would make an
Atlantic seaboard State, and that with no
peril, and, according to our way of thought,
no particular difficulty. At any rate, it was
not people who went into the desert merely
to write it up who invented the fabled
Hassaympa, of whose waters, if any drink,
they can no more see fact as naked fact,
but all radiant with the color of romance.
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I, who must have drunk of it in my twice
seven years' wanderings, am assured that it
is worth while.

For all the toll the desert takes of a man
it gives compensations, deep breaths, deep
sleep, and the communion of the stars. It
comes upon one with new force in the
pauses of the night that the Chaldeans
were a desert-bred people. It is hard to
escape the sense of mastery as the stars
move in the wide clear heavens to risings
and settings unobscured. They look large
and near and palpitant ; as if they moved
on some stately service not needful to de-
clare. Wheeling to their stations in the
sky, they make the poor world-fret of no
account. Of no account you who lie out
there watching, nor the lean coyote that
stands off in the scrub from you and howls
and howls.

21

WATER TRAILS OF THE
CERISO

WATER TRAILS OF THE
CERISO

BY the end of the dry season the water
trails of the Ceriso are worn to a white
ribbon in the leaning grass, spread out faint
and fan wise toward the homes of gopher
and ground rat and squirrel. But how-
ever faint to man-sight, they are sufficiently
plain to the furred and feathered folk who
travel them. Getting down to the eye level
of rat and squirrel kind, one perceives what
might easily be wide and winding roads to
us if they occurred in thick plantations of
trees three times the height of a man. It
needs but a slender thread of barrenness to
make a mouse trail in the forest of the sod.
To the little people the water trails are as
country roads, with scents as signboards.
25

WATER TRAILS OF THE CERISO

It seems that man-height is the least
fortunate of all heights from which to study
trails. It is better to go up the front of
some tall hill, say the spur of Black Moun-
tain, looking back and down across the
hollow of the Ceriso. Strange how long
the soil keeps the impression of any con-
tinuous treading, even after grass has over-
grown it. Twenty years since, a brief hey-
day of mining at Black Mountain made a
stage road across the Ceriso, yet the par-
allel lines that are the wheel traces show
from the height dark and well defined.
Afoot in the Ceriso one looks in vain for
any sign of it. So all the paths that wild
creatures use going down to the Lone Tree
Spring are mapped out whitely from this
level, which is also the level of the hawks.

There is little water in the Ceriso at the
best of times, and that little brackish and
26

WATER TRAILS OF THE CERISO

smelling vilely, but by a lone juniper where
the rim of the Ceriso breaks away to the
lower country, there is a perpetual rill of
fresh sweet drink in the midst of lush grass
and watercress. In the dry season there
is no water else for a man's long journey
of a day. East to the foot of Black Moun-
tain, and north and south without count-
ing, are the burrows of small rodents, rat
and squirrel kind. Under the sage are
the shallow forms of the jackrabbits, and in
the dry banks of washes, and among the
strewn fragments of black rock, lairs of
bobcat, fox, and coyote.

The coyote is your true water-witch, one
who snuffs and paws, snuffs and paws
again at the smallest spot of moisture-
scented earth until he has freed the blind
water from the soil. Many water -holes
are no more than this detected by the lean
27

WATER TRAILS OF THE CERISO

hobo of the hills in localities where not
even an Indian would look for it.

It is the opinion of many wise and busy
people that the hill-folk pass the ten-month
interval between the end and renewal of
winter rains, with no drink ; but your true
idler, with days and nights to spend beside
the water trails, will not subscribe to it.
The trails begin, as I said, very far back in
the Ceriso, faintly, and converge in one
span broad, white, hard-trodden way in the
gully of the spring. And why trails if
there are no travelers in that direction ?

I have yet to find the land not scarred
by the thin, far roadways of rabbits and
what not of furry folks that run in them.
Venture to look for some seldom-touched
water-hole, and so long as the trails run
with your general direction make sure you
are right, but if they begin to cross yours
28

WATER TRAILS OF THE CERISO

at never so slight an angle, to converge
toward a point left or right of your objec-
tive, no matter what the maps say, or your
memory, trust them ; they know.

It is very still in the Ceriso by day, so
that were it not for the evidence of those
white beaten ways, it might be the desert
it looks. The sun is hot in the dry season,
and the days are filled with the glare of it.
Now and again some unseen coyote signals
his pack in a long-drawn, dolorous whine
that comes from no determinate point, but
nothing stirs much before mid-afternoon.
It is a sign when there begin to be hawks
skimming above the sage that the little
people are going about their business.

We have fallen on a very careless usage,

speaking of wild creatures as if they were

bound by some such limitation as hampers

clockwork. When we say of one and an-

29

WATER TRAILS OF THE CERISO

other, they are night prowlers, it is perhaps
true only as the things they feed upon are
more easily come by in the dark, and they
know well how to adjust themselves to con-
ditions wherein food is more plentiful by
day. And their accustomed performance
is very much a matter of keen eye, keener
scent, quick ear, and a better memory of
sights and sounds than man dares boast.
Watch a coyote come out of his lair and
cast about in his mind where he will go
for his daily killing. You cannot very well
tell what decides him, but very easily that
he has decided. He trots or breaks into
short gallops, with very perceptible pauses
to look up and about at landmarks, alters
his tack a little, looking forward and back
to steer his proper course. I am persuaded
that the coyotes in my valley, which is nar-
row and beset with steep, sharp hills, in
30

WATER TRAILS OF THE CERISO

long passages steer by the pinnacles of the
sky-line, going with head cocked to one
side to keep to the left or right of such and
such a promontory.

I have trailed a coyote often, going across
country, perhaps to where some slant-
winged scavenger hanging in the air sig-
naled prospect of a dinner, and found his
track such as a man, a very intelligent man
accustomed to a hill country, and a little
cautious, would make to the same point.
Here a detour to avoid a stretch of too
little cover, there a pause on the rim of a
gully to pick the better way, — and it is usu-
ally the best way, — and making his point
with the greatest economy of effort. Since
the time of Seyavi the deer have shifted
their feeding ground across the valley at
the beginning of deep snows, by way of the
Black Rock, fording the river at Charley's

WATER TRAILS OF THE CERISO

Butte, and making straight for the mouth
of the canon that is the easiest going to the
winter pastures on Waban. So they still
cross, though whatever trail they had has
been long broken by ploughed ground ; but
from the mouth of Tinpah Creek, where the
deer come out of the Sierras, it is easily seen
that the creek, the point of Black Rock,
and Charley's Butte are in line with the
wide bulk of shade that is the foot of Wa-
ban Pass. And along with this the deer
have learned that Charley's Butte is almost
the only possible ford, and all the shortest
crossing of the valley. It seems that the
wild creatures have learned all that is im-
portant to their way of life except the
changes of the moon. I have seen some

o

prowling fox or coyote, surprised by its

sudden rising from behind the mountain

wall, slink in its increasing glow, watch it

32

WATER TRAILS OF THE CERISO

furtively from the cover of near-by brush,
unprepared and half uncertain of its identity
until it rode clear of the peaks, and finally
make off with all the air of one caught nap-
ping by an ancient joke. The moon in its
wanderings must be a sort of exasperation
to cunning beasts, likely to spoil by un-
timely risings some fore-planned mischief.
But to take the trail again ; the coyotes
that are astir in the Ceriso of late after-
noons, harrying the rabbits from their
shallow forms, and the hawks that sweep
and swing above them, are not there from
any mechanical promptings of instinct,
but because they know of old experience
that the small fry are about to take to seed
gathering and the water trails. The rabbits
begin it, taking the trail with long, light
leaps, one eye and ear cocked to the hills
from whence a coyote might descend upon
33

WATER TRAILS OF THE CERISO

them at any moment. Rabbits are a fool-
ish people. They do not fight except with
their own kind, nor use their paws except
for feet, and appear to have no reason for
existence but to furnish meals for meat-
eaters. In flight they seem to rebound from
the earth of their own elasticity, but keep
a sober pace going to the spring. It is the
young watercress that tempts them and the
pleasures of society, for they seldom drink.
Even in localities where there are flowing
streams they seem to prefer the moisture
that collects on herbage, and after rains
may be seen rising on their haunches to
drink delicately the clear drops caught in
the tops of the young sage. But drink
they must, as I have often seen them morn-
ings and evenings at the rill that goes by
my door. Wait long enough at the Lone
Tree Spring and sooner or later they will
34

WATER TRAILS OF THE CERISO

all come in. But here their matings are
accomplished, and though they are fearful
of so little as a cloud shadow or blown leaf,
they contrive to have some playful hours.
At the spring the bobcat drops down upon
them from the black rock, and the red fox
picks them up returning in the dark. By
day the hawk and eagle overshadow them,
and the coyote has all times and seasons
for his own.

Cattle, when there are any in the Ceriso,
drink morning and evening, spending the
night on the warm last lighted slopes of
neighboring hills, stirring with the peep o'
day. In these half wild spotted steers the
habits of an earlier lineage persist. It must
be long since they have made beds for them-
selves, but before lying down they turn
themselves round and round as dogs do.
They choose bare and stony ground, ex-
35

WATER TRAILS OF THE CERISO

posed fronts of westward facing hills, and
lie down in companies. Usually by the end
of the summer the cattle have been driven
or gone of their own choosing to the moun-
tain meadows. One year a maverick year-
ling, strayed or overlooked by the vaqueros,
kept on until the season's end, and so be-
trayed another visitor to the spring that
else I might have missed. On a certain
morning the half-eaten carcass lay at the
foot of the black rock, and in moist earth
by the rill of the spring, the foot-pads of a
cougar, puma, mountain lion, or whatever
the beast is rightly called. The kill must
have been made early in the evening, for it
appeared that the cougar had been twice to
the spring ; and since the meat-eater drinks
little until he has eaten, he must have fed
and drunk, and after an interval of lying
up in the black rock, had eaten and drunk
36

WATER TRAILS OF THE CERISO

again. There was no knowing how far he
had come, but if he came again the second
night he found that the coyotes had left him
very little of his kill.

Nobody ventures to say how infrequently
and at what hour the small fry visit the
spring. There are such numbers of them
that if each came once between the last of
spring and the first of winter rains, there
would still be water trails. I have seen
badgers drinking about the hour when the
light takes on the yellow tinge it has from
coming slantwise through the hills. They
find out shallow places, and are loath to wet
their feet. Rats and chipmunks have been
observed visiting the spring as late as nine
o'clock mornings. The larger spermophiles
that live near the spring and keep awake to
work all day, come and go at no particular
hour, drinking sparingly. At long inter-
37

WATER TRAILS OF THE CERISO

vals on half-lighted days, meadow and field
mice steal delicately along the trail. These
visitors are all too small to be watched
carefully at night, but for evidence of their
frequent coming there are the trails that
may be traced miles out among the crisp-
ing grasses. On rare nights, in the places
where no 'grass grows between the shrubs,
and the sand silvers whitely to the moon,
one sees them whisking to and fro on in-
numerable errands of seed gathering, but
the chief witnesses of their presence near
the spring are the elf owls. Those bur-
row-haunting, speckled fluffs of greediness
begin a twilight flitting toward the spring,
feeding as they go on grasshoppers, lizards,
and small, swift creatures, diving into bur-
rows to catch field mice asleep, battling
with chipmunks at their own doors, and
getting down in great numbers toward the
38

WATER TRAILS OF THE CERISO

lone juniper. Now owls do not love water
greatly on its own account. Not to my
knowledge have I caught one drinking or
bathing, though on night wanderings across
the mesa they flit up from under the horse's
feet along stream borders. Their presence
near the spring in great numbers would
indicate the presence of the things they
feed upon. All night the rustle and soft
hooting keeps on in the neighborhood of
the spring, with seldom small shrieks of
mortal agony. It is clear day before they
have all gotten back to their particular
hummocks, and if one follows cautiously,
not to frighten them into some near-by
burrow, it is possible to trail them far up
the slope.

The crested quail that troop in the
Ceriso are the happiest frequenters of the
water trails. There is no furtiveness about
39

WATER TRAILS OF THE CERISO

their morning drink. About the time the
burrowers and all that feed upon them are
addressing themselves to sleep, great flocks
pour down the trails with that peculiar
melting motion of moving quail, twitter-
ing, shoving, and shouldering. They splat-
ter into the shallows, drink daintily, shake
out small showers over their perfect coats,
and melt away again into the scrub, preen-
ing and pranking, with soft contented
noises.

After the quail, sparrows and ground-
inhabiting birds bathe with the utmost
frankness and a great deal of splutter ; and
here in the heart of noon hawks resort, sit-
ting panting, with wings aslant, and a truce
to all hostilities because of the heat. One
summer there came a road-runner up from
the lower valley, peeking and prying, and
he had never any patience with the water
40

WATER TRAILS OF THE CER1SO

baths of the sparrows. His own ablutions
were performed in the clean, hopeful dust
of the chaparral ; and whenever he hap-
pened on their morning splatterings, he
would depress his glossy crest, slant his
shining tail to the level of his body, until
he looked most like some bright venomous
snake, daunting them with shrill abuse and
feint of battle. Then suddenly he would
go tilting and balancing down the gully in
fine disdain, only to return in a day or two
to make sure the foolish bodies were still
at it.

Out on the Ceriso about five miles, and
wholly out of sight of it, near where the
immemorial foot trail goes up from Saline
Flat toward Black Mountain, is a water
sign worth turning out of the trail to see.
It is a laid circle of stones large enough
not to be disturbed by any ordinary hap,

WATER TRAILS OF THE CERISO

with an opening flanked by two parallel
rows of similar stones, between which were

FIG. i.

an arrow placed, touching the opposite rim
of the circle, thus (Fig. i), it would point
as the crow flies to the spring. It is the
old, indubitable water mark of the Sho-
shones. One still finds it in the desert
ranges in Salt Wells and Mesquite valleys,
and along the slopes of Waban. On the
other side of Ceriso, where the black rock
begins, about a mile from the spring, is the
work of an older, forgotten people. The
rock hereabout is all volcanic, fracturing
with a crystalline whitish surface, but weath-
42

WATER TRAILS OF THE CERISO

ered outside to furnace blackness. Around
the spring, where must have been a gath-
ering place of the tribes, it is scored over
with strange pictures and symbols that
have no meaning to the Indians of the pre-
sent day ; but out where the rock begins,
there is carved into the white heart of it a

FIG. 2.

pointing arrow over the symbol for dis-
tance and a circle full of wavy lines (Fig.
2) reading thus : " In this direction three
[units of measurement unknown] is a
spring of sweet water ; look for it."
43

THE SCAVENGERS

THE SCAVENGERS

FIFTY-SEVEN buzzards, one on each
of fifty-seven fence posts at the rancho
El Tejon, on a mirage-breeding September
morning, sat solemnly while the white
tilted travelers' vans lumbered down the
Canada de los Uvas. After three hours
they had only clapped their wings, or ex-
changed posts. The season's end in the
vast dim valley of the San Joaquin is pal-
pitatingly hot, and the air breathes like
cotton wool. Through it all the buzzards
sit on the fences and low hummocks, with
wings spead fanwise for air. There is no
end to them, and they smell to heaven.
Their heads droop, and all their communi-
cation is a rare, horrid croak.

The increase of wild creatures is in pro-
47

THE SCAVENGERS

portion to the things they feed upon : the
more carrion the more buzzards. The end
of the third successive dry year bred them
beyond belief. The first year quail mated
sparingly; the second year the wild oats
matured no seed ; the third, cattle died in
their tracks with their heads towards the
stopped watercourses. And that year the
scavengers were as black as the plague all
across the mesa and up the treeless, tumbled
hills. On clear days they betook them-
selves to the upper air, where they hung
motionless for hours. That year there
were vultures among them, distinguished
by the white patches under the wings. All
their offensiveness notwithstanding, they
have a stately flight. They must also have
what pass for good qualities among them-
selves, for they are social, not to say clan-
nish.

48

THE SCAVENGERS

It is a very squalid tragedy, — that of
the dying brutes and the scavenger birds.
Death by starvation is slow. The heavy-
headed, rack-boned cattle totter in the fruit-
less trails ; they stand for long, patient
intervals ; they lie down and do not rise.
There is fear in their eyes when they are
first stricken, but afterward only intol-
erable weariness. I suppose the dumb
creatures know nearly as much of death
as do their betters, who have only the more
imagination. Their even-breathing sub-
mission after the first agony is their trib-
ute to its inevitableness. It needs a nice
discrimination to say which of the basket-
ribbed cattle is likest to afford the next
meal, but the scavengers make few mis-
takes. One stoops to the quarry and the
flock follows.

Cattle once down may be days in dying.
49

THE SCAVENGERS

They stretch out their necks along the
ground, and roll up their slow eyes at longer
intervals. The buzzards have all the time,
and no beak is dropped or talon struck un-
til the breath is wholly passed. It is doubt-
less the economy of nature to have the
scavengers by to clean up the carrion, but
a wolf at the throat would be a shorter
agony than the long stalking and sometime
perchings of these loathsome watchers.
Suppose now it were a man in this long-
drawn, hungrily spied upon distress !
When Timmie O'Shea was lost on Armo-
gossa Flats for three days without water,
Long Tom Basset found him, not by any
trail, but by making straight away for the
points where he saw buzzards stooping.
He could hear the beat of their wings,
Tom said, and trod on their shadows, but
O'Shea was past recalling what he thought
50

LOST FOR THREE DAYS IN THE DESERT

THE SCAVENGERS

about things after the second day. My
friend Ewan told me, among other things,
when he came back from San Juan Hill,
that not all the carnage of battle turned
his bowels as the sight of slant black wings
rising flockwise before the burial squad.

There are three kinds of noises buzzards
make, — it is impossible to call them notes,
— raucous and elemental. There is a short
croak of alarm, and the same syllable in a
modified tone to serve all the purposes of
ordinary conversation. The old birds make
a kind of throaty chuckling to their young,
but if they have any love song I have not
heard it. The young yawp in the nest a
little, with more breath than noise. It is
seldom one finds a buzzard's nest, seldom
that grown-ups find a nest of any sort ; it
is only children to whom these things hap-
pen by right. But by making a business

THE SCAVENGERS

of it one may come upon them in wide,
quiet canons, or on the lookouts of lonely,
table-topped mountains, three or four to-
gether, in the tops of stubby trees or on
rotten cliffs well open to the sky.

It is probable that the buzzard is grega-
rious, but it seems unlikely from the small
number of young noted at any time that
every female incubates each year. The
young birds are easily distinguished by
their size when feeding, and high up in air
by the worn primaries of the older birds.
It is when the young go out of the nest
on their first foraging that the parents,
full of a crass and simple pride, make their
indescribable chucklings of gobbling, glut-
tonous delight. The little ones would be
amusing as they tug and tussle, if one
could forget what it is they feed upon.

One never comes any nearer to the vul-
52

THE SCAVENGERS

ture's nest or nestlings than hearsay. They
keep to the southerly Sierras, and are bold
enough, it seems, to do killing on their own
account when no carrion is at hand. They
dog the shepherd from camp to camp, the
hunter home from the hill, and will even
carry away offal from under his hand.

The vulture merits respect for his big-
ness and for his bandit airs, but he is a
sombre bird, with none of the buzzard's
frank satisfaction in his offensiveness.

The least objectionable of the inland
scavengers is the raven, frequenter of the
desert ranges, the same called locally " car-
rion crow." He is handsomer and has such
an air. He is nice in his habits and is
said to have likable traits. A tame one in
a Shoshone camp was the butt of much
sport and enjoyed it. He could all but
talk and was another with the children,
53

THE SCAVENGERS

but an arrant thief. The raven will eat
most things that come his way, — eggs and
young of ground-nesting birds, seeds even,
lizards and grasshoppers, which he catches
cleverly ; and whatever he is about, let a
coyote trot never so softly by, the raven
flaps up and after; for whatever the coyote
can pull down or nose out is meat also
for the carrion crow.

And never a coyote comes out of his
lair for killing, in the country of the car-
rion crows, but looks up first to see where
they may be gathering. It is a sufficient
occupation for a windy morning, on the
lineless, level mesa, to watch the pair of
them eying each other furtively, with a
tolerable assumption of unconcern, but no
doubt with a certain amount of good un-
derstanding about it. Once at Red Rock,
in a year of green pasture, which is a bad
54

THE SCAVENGERS

time for the scavengers, we saw two buz-
zards, five ravens, and a coyote feeding
on the same carrion, and only the coyote
seemed ashamed of the company.

Probably we never fully credit the inter-
dependence of wild creatures, and their
cognizance of the affairs of their own kind.
When the five coyotes that range the Te-
jon from Pasteria to Tunawai planned a
relay race to bring down an antelope
strayed from the band, beside myself to
watch, an eagle swung down from Mt.
Pinos, buzzards materialized out of invis-
ible ether, and hawks came trooping like
small boys to a street fight. Rabbits sat
up in the chaparral and cocked their ears,
feeling themselves quite safe for the once
as the hunt swung near them. Nothing
happens in the deep wood that the blue
jays are not all agog to tell. The hawk
55

THE SCAVENGERS

follows the badger, the coyote the carrion
crow, and from their aerial stations the
buzzards watch each other. What would
be worth knowing is how much of their
neighbor's affairs the new generations
learn for themselves, and how much they
are taught of their elders.

So wide is the range of the scavengers
that it is never safe to say, eyewitness to
the contrary, that there are few or many in
such a place. Where the carrion is, there
will the buzzards be gathered together, and
in three days' journey you will not sight
another one. The way up from Mojave to
Red Butte is all desertness, affording no
pasture and scarcely a rill of water. In a
year of little rain in the south, flocks and
herds were driven to the number of thou-
sands along this road to the perennial pas-
tures of the high ranges. It is a long, slow
56

THE SCAVENGERS

trail, ankle deep in bitter dust that gets
up in the slow wind and moves along the
backs of the crawling cattle. In the worst
of times one in three will pine and fall out
by the way. In the defiles of Red Rock,
the sheep piled up a stinking lane ; it was
the sun smiting by day. To these sham-
bles came buzzards, vultures, and coyotes
from all the country round, so that on the
Tejon, the Ceriso, and the Little Antelope
there were not scavengers enough to keep
the country clean. All that summer the
dead mummified in the open or dropped
slowly back to earth in the quagmires of
the bitter springs. Meanwhile from Red
Rock to Coyote Holes, and from Coyote
Holes to Haiwai the scavengers gorged
and gorged.

The coyote is not a scavenger by choice,
preferring his own kill, but being on the
57

THE SCAVENGERS

whole a lazy dog, is apt to fall into carrion
eating because it is easier. The red fox
and bobcat, a little pressed by hunger, will
eat of any other animal's kill, but will not
ordinarily touch what dies of itself, and are
exceedingly shy of food that has been man-
handled.

Very clean and handsome, quite bely-
ing his relationship in appearance, is
Clark's crow, that scavenger and plunderer
of mountain camps. It is permissible to
call him by his common name, " Camp
Robber : " he has earned it. Not content
with refuse, he pecks open meal sacks,
filches whole potatoes, is a gormand for
bacon, drills holes in packing cases, and is
daunted by nothing short of tin. All the
while he does not neglect to vituperate
the chipmunks and sparrows that whisk
off crumbs of comfort from under the
58

THE SCAVENGERS

camper's feet. The Camp Robber's gray
coat, black and white barred wings, and
slender bill, with certain tricks of perching,
accuse him of attempts to pass himself off
among woodpeckers ; but his behavior is
all crow. He frequents the higher pine
belts, and has a noisy strident call like a
jay's, and how clean he and the frisk-tailed
chipmunks keep the camp! No crumb or
paring or bit of eggshell goes amiss.

High as the camp may be, so it is not
above timber-line, it is not too high for
the coyote, the bobcat, or the wolf. It is
the complaint of the ordinary camper that
the woods are too still, depleted of wild
life. But what dead body of wild thing, or
neglected game untouched by its kind, do
you find ? And put out offal away from
camp over night, and look next day at the
foot tracks where it lay.
59

THE SCAVENGERS

Man is a great blunderer going about
in the woods, and there is no other except
the bear makes so much noise. Being so
well warned beforehand, it is a very stupid
animal, or a very bold one, that cannot
keep safely hid. The cunningest hunter is
hunted in turn, and what he leaves of his
kill is meat for some other. That is the
economy of nature, but with it all there is
not sufficient account taken of the works
of man. There is no scavenger that eats
tin cans, and no wild thing leaves a like
disfigurement on the forest floor.

THE POCKET HUNTER

THE POCKET HUNTER

I REMEMBER very well when I first
met him. Walking in the evening glow
to spy the marriages of the white gilias, I
sniffed the unmistakable odor of burning
sage. It is a smell that carries far and indi-
cates usually the nearness of a campoodie,
but on the level mesa nothing taller showed
than Diana's sage. Over the tops of it, be-
ginning to dusk under a young white moon,
trailed a wavering ghost of smoke, and at
the end of it I came upon the Pocket
Hunter making a dry camp in the friendly
scrub. He sat tailorwise in the sand, with
his coffee-pot on the coals, his supper ready
to hand in the frying pan, and himself in a
mood for talk. His pack burros in hobbles
strayed off to hunt for a wetter mouthful
63

THE POCKET HUNTER

than the sage afforded, and gave him no
concern.

We came upon him often after that,
threading the windy passes, or by water-
holes in the desert hills, and got to know
much of his way of life. He was a small,
bowed man, with a face and manner and
speech of no character at all, as if he had
that faculty of small hunted things of tak-
ing on the protective color of his surround-
ings. His clothes were of no fashion that
I could remember, except that they bore
liberal markings of pot black, and he had
a curious fashion of going about with his
mouth open, which gave him a vacant look
until you came near enough to perceive
him busy about an endless hummed, word-
less tune. He traveled far and took a long
time to it, but the simplicity of his kitchen
arrangements was elemental. A pot for
64

THE POCKET HUNTER

beans, a coffee-pot, a frying-pan, a tin to
mix bread in — he fed the burros in this
when there was need — with these he had
been half round our western world and
back. He explained to me very early in our
acquaintance what was good to take to
the hills for food : nothing sticky, for that
"dirtied the pots ;" nothing with "juice"
to it, for that would not pack to advantage ;
and nothing likely to ferment. He used no
gun, but he would set snares by the water-
holes for quail and doves, and in the trout
country he carried a line. Burros he kept,
one or two according to his pack, for this
chief excellence, that they would eat potato
parings and firewood. He had owned a
horse in the foothill country, but when he
came to the desert with no forage but mes-
quite, he found himself under the neces-
sity of picking the beans from the briers,
65

THE POCKET HUNTER

a labor that drove him to the use of pack
animals to whom thorns were a relish.

I suppose no man becomes a pocket
hunter by first intention. He must be born
with the faculty, and along comes the occa-
sion, like the tap on the test tube that in-
duces crystallization. My friend had been
several things of no moment until he struck
a thousand-dollar pocket in the Lee District
and came into his vocation. A pocket, you
must know, is a small body of rich ore oc-
curring by itself, or in a vein of poorer stuff.
Nearly every mineral ledge contains such,
if only one has the luck to hit upon them
without too much labor. The sensible
thing for a man to do who has found a good
pocket is to buy himself into business and
keep away from the hills. The logical thing
is to set out looking for another one. My
friend the Pocket Hunter had been looking
66

THE POCKET HUNTER

twenty years. His working outfit was a
shovel, a pick, a gold pan which he kept
cleaner than his plate, and a pocket mag-
nifier. When he came to a watercourse
he would pan out the gravel of its bed for
" colors," and under the glass determine if
they had come from far or near, and so spy-
ing he would work up the stream until he
found where the drift of the gold-bearing
outcrop fanned out into the creek ; then
up the side of the canon till he came to
the proper vein. I think he said the best
indication of small pockets was an iron
stain, but I could never get the run of
miner's talk enough to feel instructed for
pocket hunting. He had another method
in the waterless hills, where he would work
in and out of blind gullies and all windings
of the manifold strata that appeared not
to have cooled since they had been heaved
67

THE POCKET HUNTER

up. His itinerary began with the east
slope of the Sierras of the Snows, where
that range swings across to meet the coast
hills, and all up that slope to the Truckee
River country, where the long cold forbade
his progress north. Then he worked back
down one or another of the nearly parallel
ranges that lie out desertward, and so down
to the sink of the Mojave River, burrowing
to oblivion in the sand, — a big mysterious
land, a lonely, inhospitable land, beautiful,
terrible. But he came to no harm in it ; the
land tolerated him as it might a gopher or
a badger. Of all its inhabitants it has the
least concern for man.

There are many strange sorts of humans
bred in a mining country, each sort despis-
ing the queernesses of the other, but of them
all I found the Pocket Hunter most accept-
able for his clean, companionable talk.
68

THE POCKET HUNTER

There was more color to his reminiscences
than the faded sandy old miners " kyote-
ing," that is, tunneling like a coyote (kyote
in the vernacular) in the core of a lonesome
hill. Such a one has found, perhaps, a body
of tolerable ore in a poor lead, — remember
that I can never be depended on to get the
terms right, — and followed it into the heart
of country rock to no profit, hoping, bur-
rowing, and hoping. These men go harm-
lessly mad in time, believing themselves
just behind the wall of fortune — most lik-
able and simple men, for whom it is well
to do any kindly thing that occurs to you
except lend them money. I have known
" grub stakers " too, those persuasive sin-
ners to whom you make allowances of flour
and pork and coffee in consideration of the
ledges they are about to find ; but none of
these proved so much worth while as the
69

THE POCKET HUNTER

Pocket Hunter. He wanted nothing of
you and maintained a cheerful preference
for his own way of life. It was an excellent
way if you had the constitution for it. The
Pocket Hunter had gotten to that point
where he knew no bad weather, and all
places were equally happy so long as they
were out of doors. I do not know just
how long it takes to become saturated with
the elements so that one takes no account
of them. Myself can never get past the
glow and exhilaration of a storm, the wrestle
of long dust-heavy winds, the play of live
thunder on the rocks, nor past the keen
fret of fatigue when the storm outlasts
physical endurance. But prospectors and
Indians get a kind of a weather shell that
remains on the body until death.

The Pocket Hunter had seen destruction
by the violence of nature and the violence
70

THE POCKET HUNTER

of men, and felt himself in the grip of an
All-wisdom that killed men or spared them
as seemed for their good ; but of death by
sickness he knew nothing except that he
believed he should never suffer it. He had
been in Grape-vine Canon the year of storms
that changed the whole front of the moun-
tain. All day he had come down under
the wing of the storm, hoping to win past it,
but finding it traveling with him until night.
It kept on after that, he supposed, a steady
downpour, but could not with certainty
say, being securely deep in sleep. But the
weather instinct does not sleep. In the
night the heavens behind the hill dissolved
in rain, and the roar of the storm was borne
in and mixed with his dreaming, so that it
moved him, still asleep, to get up and out
of the path of it. What finally woke him
was the crash of pine logs as they went down

THE POCKET HUNTER

before the unbridled flood, and the swirl of
foam that lashed him where he clung in the
tangle of scrub while the wall of water went
by. It went on against the cabin of Bill
Gerry and laid Bill stripped and broken on
a sand bar at the mouth of the Grape-vine,
seven miles away. There, when the sun
was up and the wrath of the rain spent, the
Pocket Hunter found and buried him; but
he never laid his own escape at any door
but the unintelligible favor of the Powers.
The journeyings of the Pocket Hunter
led him often into that mysterious country
beyond Hot Creek where a hidden force
works mischief, mole-like, under the crust
of the earth. Whatever agency is at work
in that neighborhood, and it is popularly
supposed to be the devil, it changes means
and direction without time or season. It
creeps up whole hillsides with insidious
72

THE POCKET HUNTER

heat, unguessed until one notes the pine
woods dying at the top, and having scorched
out a good block of timber returns to steam
and spout in caked, forgotten crevices of
years before. It will break up sometimes
blue-hot and bubbling, in the midst of a
clear creek, or make a sucking, scalding
quicksand at the ford. These outbreaks
had the kind of morbid interest for the
Pocket Hunter that a house of unsavory
reputation has in a respectable neighbor-
hood, but I always found the accounts he
brought me more interesting than his
explanations, which were compounded of
fag ends of miner's talk and superstition.
He was a perfect gossip of the woods, this
Pocket Hunter, and when I could get him
away from " leads " and " strikes " and
" contacts," full of fascinating small talk
about the ebb and flood of creeks, the
73

THE POCKET HUNTER

pifion crop on Black Mountain, and the
wolves of Mesquite Valley. I suppose he
never knew how much he depended for
the necessary sense of home and compan-
ionship on the beasts and trees, meeting
and finding them in their wonted places,
— the bear that used to come down Pine
Creek in the spring, pawing out trout
from the shelters of sod banks, the juniper
at Lone Tree Spring, and the quail at
Paddy Jack's.

There is a place on Waban, south of
White Mountain, where flat, wind-tilted
cedars make low tents and coves of shade
and shelter, where the wild sheep winter
in the snow. Woodcutters and prospectors
had brought me word of that, but the
Pocket Hunter was accessory to the fact.
About the opening of winter, when one
looks for sudden big storms, he had at-
74

THE POCKET HUNTER

tempted a crossing by the nearest path,
beginning the ascent at noon. It grew
cold, the snow came on thick and blind-
ing, and wiped out the trail in a white
smudge ; the storm drift blew in and cut
off landmarks, the early dark obscured
the rising drifts. According to the Pocket
Hunter's account, he knew where he was,
but could n't exactly say. Three days be-
fore he had been in the west arm of Death
Valley on a short water allowance, ankle-
deep in shifty sand ; now he was on the
rise of Waban, knee-deep in sodden snow,
and in both cases he did the only allow-
able thing — he walked on. That is the
only thing to do in a snowstorm in any
case. It might have been the creature
instinct, which in his way of life had room
to grow, that led him to the cedar shelter ;
at any rate he found it about four hours
75

THE POCKET HUNTER

after dark, and heard the heavy breathing
of the flock. He said that if he thought at
all at this juncture he must have thought
that he had stumbled on a storm-belated
shepherd with his silly sheep ; but in fact
he took no note of anything but the warmth
of packed fleeces, and snuggled in be-
tween them dead with sleep. If the flock
stirred in the night he stirred drowsily to
keep close and let the storm go by. That
was all until morning woke him shining
on a white world. Then the very soul of
him shook to see the wild sheep of God
stand up about him, nodding their great
horns beneath the cedar roof, looking out
on the wonder of the snow. They had
moved a little away from him with the
coming of the light, but paid him no more
heed. The light broadened and the white
pavilions of the snow swam in the hea-
76

THE POCKET HUNTER

venly blueness of the sea from which
they rose. The cloud drift scattered and
broke billowing in the canons. The leader
stamped lightly on the litter to put the
flock in motion, suddenly they took the
drifts in those long light leaps that are
nearest to flight, down and away on the
slopes of Waban. Think of that to hap-
pen to a Pocket Hunter! But though he
had fallen on many a wished-for hap, he
was curiously inapt at getting the truth
about beasts in general. He believed in
the venom of toads, and charms for snake
bites, and — for this I could never forgive
him — had all the miner's prejudices against
my friend the coyote. Thief, sneak, and
son of a thief were the friendliest words
he had for this little gray dog of the wil-
derness.

Of course with so much seeking he came
77

THE POCKET HUNTER

occasionally upon pockets of more or less
value, otherwise he could not have kept up
his way of life ; but he had as much luck
in missing great ledges as in finding small
ones. He had been all over the Tonopah
country, and brought away float without
happening upon anything that gave pro-
mise of what that district was to become in
a few years. He claimed to have chipped
bits off the very outcrop of the California
Rand, without finding it worth while to
bring away, but none of these things put
him out of countenance.

It was once in roving weather, when
we found him shifting pack on a steep
trail, that I observed certain of his be-
longings done up in green canvas bags,
the veritable " green bag " of English nov-
els. It seemed so incongruous a reminder
in this untenanted West that I dropped
78

THE POCKET HUNTER

down beside the trail overlooking the vast
dim valley, to hear about the green canvas.
He had gotten it, he said, in London years
before, and that was the first I had known
of his having been abroad. It was after
one of his " big strikes " that he had made
the Grand Tour, and had brought nothing
away from it but the green canvas bags,
which he conceived would fit his needs,
and an ambition. This last was nothing
less than to strike it rich and set himself
up among the eminently bourgeois of Lon-
don. It seemed that the situation of the
wealthy English middle class, with just
enough gentility above to aspire to, and
sufficient smaller fry to bully and patronize,
appealed to his imagination, though of
course he did not put it so crudely as that.
It was no news to me then, two or three
years after, to learn that he had taken ten
79

THE POCKET HUNTER

thousand dollars from an abandoned claim,
just the sort of luck to have pleased him,
and gone to London to spend it. The
land seemed not to miss him any more
than it had minded him, but I missed him
and could not forget the trick of expecting
him in least likely situations. Therefore
it was with a pricking sense of the familiar
that I followed a twilight trail of smoke, a
year or two later, to the swale of a drip-
ping spring, and came upon a man by the
fire with a coffee-pot and frying-pan. I
was not surprised to find it was the Pocket
Hunter. No man can be stronger than
his destiny.

SHOSHONE LAND

IT is true I have been in Shoshone Land,
but before that, long before, I had seen it
through the eyes of Winnenap' in a rosy
mist of reminiscence, and must always see
it with a sense of intimacy in the light that
never was. Sitting on the golden slope at
the campoodie, looking across the Bitter
Lake to the purple tops of Mutarango, the
medicine-man drew up its happy places
one by one, like little blessed islands in a
sea of talk. For he was born a Shoshone,
was Winnenap' ; and though his name, his
wife, his children, and his tribal relations
were of the Paiutes, his thoughts turned
homesickly toward Shoshone Land. Once
a Shoshone always a Shoshone. Winne-
nap' lived gingerly among the Paiutes and
83

SHOSHONE LAND

in his heart despised them. But he could
speak a tolerable English when he would,
and he always would if it were of Shoshone
Land.

He had come into the keeping of the
Paiutes as a hostage for the long peace
which the authority of the whites made
interminable, and, though there was now
no order in the tribe, nor any power that
could have lawfully restrained him, kept
on in the old usage, to save his honor and
the word of his vanished kin. He had
seen his children's children in the borders
of the Paiutes, but loved best his own
miles of sand and rainbow-painted hills.
Professedly he had not seen them since
the beginning of his hostage; but every
year about the end of the rains and before
the strength of the sun had come upon us
from the south, the medicine-man went
84

SHOSHONE LAND

apart on the mountains to gather herbs,
and when he came again I knew by the
new fortitude of his countenance and the
new color of his reminiscences that he had
been alone and unspied upon in Shoshone
Land.

To reach that country from the cam-
poodie, one goes south and south, within
hearing of the lip-lip-lapping of the great
tideless lake, and south by east over a
high rolling district, miles and miles of
sage and nothing else. So one comes to
the country of the painted hills, — old red
cones of craters, wasteful beds of mineral
earths, hot, acrid springs, and steam jets
issuing from a leprous soil. After the
hills the black rock, after the craters the
spewed lava, ash strewn, of incredible
thickness, and full of sharp, winding rifts.
There are picture writings carved deep in
85

SHOSHONE LAND

the face of the cliffs to mark the way for
those who do not know it. On the very
edge of the black rock the earth falls away
in a wide sweeping hollow, which is Sho-
shone Land.

South the land rises in very blue hills,
blue because thickly wooded with ceano-
thus and manzanita, the haunt of deer and
the border of the Shoshones. Eastward
the land goes very far by broken ranges,
narrow valleys of pure desertness, and
huge mesas uplifted to the sky-line, east
and east, and no man knows the end of it.

It is the country of the bighorn, the
wapiti, and the wolf, nesting place of buz-
zards, land of cloud-nourished trees and
wild things that live without drink. Above
all, it is the land of the creosote and the
mesquite. The mesquite is God's best
thought in all this desertness. It grows
86

SHOSHONE LAND

in the open, is thorny, stocky, close grown,
and iron-rooted. Long winds move in the
draughty valleys, blown sand fills and fills
about the lower branches, piling pyramidal
dunes, from the top of which the mesquite
twigs flourish greenly. Fifteen or twenty
feet under the drift, where it seems no rain
could penetrate, the main trunk grows,
attaining often a yard's thickness, resist-
ant as oak. In Shoshone Land one digs
for large timber ; that is in the southerly,
sandy exposures. Higher on the table-
topped ranges low trees of juniper and
pifion stand each apart, rounded and
spreading heaps of greenness. Between
them, but each to itself in smooth clear
spaces, tufts of tall feathered grass.

This is the sense of the desert hills, that
there is room enough and time enough.
Trees grow to consummate domes ; every
87

SHOSHONE LAND

plant has its perfect work. Noxious weeds
such as come up thickly in crowded fields
do not flourish in the free spaces. Live
long enough with an Indian, and he or
the wild things will show you a use for
everything that grows in these borders.

The manner of the country makes the
usage of life there, and the land will not
be lived in except in its own fashion. The
Shoshones live like their trees, with great
spaces between, and in pairs and in family
groups they set up wattled huts by the in-
frequent springs. More wickiups than two
make a very great number. Their shelters
are lightly built, for they travel much and
far, following where deer feed and seeds
ripen, but they are not more lonely than
other creatures that inhabit there.

The year's round is somewhat in this
fashion. After the pinon harvest the

SHOSHONE LAND

clans foregather on a warm southward
slope for the annual adjustment of tribal
difficulties and the medicine dance, for
marriage and mourning and vengeance,
and the exchange of serviceable informa-
tion ; if, for example, the deer have shifted
their feeding ground, if the wild sheep
have come back to Waban, or certain
springs run full or dry. Here the Sho-
shones winter flockwise, weaving baskets
and hunting big game driven down from
the country of the deep snow. And this
brief intercourse is all the use they have of
their kind, for now there are no wars, and
many of their ancient crafts have fallen
into disuse. The solitariness of the life
breeds in the men, as in the plants, a cer-
tain well-roundedness and sufficiency to its
own ends. Any Shoshone family has in
itself the man-seed, power to multiply and
89

SHOSHONE LAND

replenish, potentialities for food and cloth-
ing and shelter, for healing and beautify-
ing.

When the rain is over and gone they
are stirred by the instinct of those that
journeyed eastward from Eden, and go up
each with his mate and young brood, like
birds to old nesting places. The begin-
ning of spring in Shoshone Land — oh
the soft wonder of it ! — is a mistiness as
of incense smoke, a veil of greenness over
the whitish stubby shrubs, a web of color
on the silver sanded soil. No counting
covers the multitude of rayed blossoms
that break suddenly underfoot in the brief
season of the winter rains, with silky furred
or prickly viscid foliage, or no foliage at all.
They are morning and evening bloomers
chiefly, and strong seeders. Years of scant
rains they lie shut and safe in the win-
90

SHOSHONE LAND

nowed sands, so that some species appear
to be extinct. Years of long storms they
break so thickly into bloom that no horse
treads without crushing them. These
years the gullies of the hills are rank with
fern and a great tangle of climbing vines.

Just as the mesa twilights have their
vocal note in the love call of the burrow-
ing owl, so the desert spring is voiced by
the mourning doves. Welcome and sweet
they sound in the smoky mornings before
breeding time, and where they frequent in
any great numbers water is confidently
looked for. Still by the springs one finds
the cunning brush shelters from which the
Shoshones shot arrows at them when the
doves came to drink.

Now as to these same Shoshones there
are some who claim that they have no right
to the name, which belongs to a more north-

SHOSHONE LAND

erly tribe ; but that is the word they will be
called by, and there is no greater offense
than to call an Indian out of his name.
According to their traditions and all proper
evidence, they were a great people occu-
pying far north and east of their present
bounds, driven thence by the Paiutes. Be-
tween the two tribes is the residuum of old
hostilities.

Winnenap', whose memory ran to the
time when the boundary of the Paiute coun-
try was a dead-line to Shoshones, told me
once how himself and another lad, in an
unforgotten spring, discovered a nesting
place of buzzards a bit of a way beyond the
borders. And they two burned to rob those
nests. Oh, for no purpose at all except as
boys rob nests immemorially, for the fun
of it, to have and handle and show to other
lads as an exceeding treasure, and after-
92

SHOSHONE LAND

wards discard. So, not quite meaning to,
but breathless with daring, they crept up a
gully, across a sage brush flat and through
a waste of boulders, to the rugged pines
where their sharp eyes had made out the
buzzards settling.

The medicine-man told me, always with
a quaking relish at this point, that while
they, grown bold by success, were still in
the tree, they sighted a Paiute hunting
party crossing between them and their
own land. That was mid-morning, and all
day on into the dark the boys crept and
crawled and slid, from boulder to bush,
and bush to boulder, in cactus scrub and
on naked sand, always in a sweat of fear,
until the dust caked in the nostrils and
the breath sobbed in the body, around
and away many a mile until they came to
their own land again. And all the time
93

SHOSHONE LAND

Winnenap' carried those buzzard's eggs in
the slack of his single buckskin garment !
Young Shoshones are like young quail,
knowing without teaching about feeding
and hiding, and learning what civilized chil-
dren never learn, to be still and to keep on
being still, at the first hint of danger or
strangeness.

As for food, that appears to be chiefly a
matter of being willing. Desert Indians all
eat chuck-wallas, big black and white liz-
ards that have delicate white flesh savored
like chicken. Both the Shoshones and the
coyotes are fond of the flesh of Gopherus
agassizii, the turtle that by feeding on
buds, going without drink, and burrowing
in the sand through the winter, contrives
to live a known period of twenty-five years.
It seems that most seeds are foodful in the
arid regions, most berries edible, and many
94

SHOSHONE LAND

shrubs good for firewood with the sap in
them. The mesquite bean, whether the
screw or straight pod, pounded to a meal,
boiled to a kind of mush, and dried in
cakes, sulphur-colored and needing an axe
to cut it, is an excellent food for long jour-
neys. Fermented in water with wild honey
and the honeycomb, it makes a pleasant,
mildly intoxicating drink.

Next to spring, the best time to visit
Shoshone Land is when the deer-star hangs
low and white like a torch over the morn-
ing hills. Go up past Winnedumah and
down Saline and up again to the rim of
Mesquite Valley. Take no tent, but if you
will, have an Indian build you a wickiup,
willows planted in a circle, drawn over to
an arch, and bound cunningly with withes,
all the leaves on, and chinks to count the
stars through. But there was never any
95

SHOSHONE LAND

but Winnenap' who could tell and make
it worth telling about Shoshone Land.

And Winnenap' will not any more. He
died, as do most medicine-men of the
Paiutes.

Where the lot falls when the campoodie
chooses a medicine-man there it rests. It
is an honor a man seldom seeks but must
wear, an honor with a condition. When
three patients die under his ministrations,
the medicine-man must yield his life and
his office. Wounds do not count ; broken
bones and bullet holes the Indian can
understand, but measles, pneumonia, and
smallpox are witchcraft. Winnenap' was
medicine-man for fifteen years. Besides
considerable skill in healing herbs, he used
his prerogatives cunningly. It is permit-
ted the medicine-man to decline the case
when the patient has had treatment from
96

SHOSHONE LAND

any other, say the white doctor, whom
many of the younger generation consult.
Or, if before having seen the patient, he
can definitely refer his disorder to some
supernatural cause wholly out of the medi-
cine-man's jurisdiction, say to the spite of
an evil spirit going about in the form of
a coyote, and states the case convincingly,
he may avoid the penalty. But this must
not be pushed too far. All else failing, he
can hide. Winnenap' did this the time of
the measles epidemic. Returning from his
yearly herb gathering, he heard of it at
Black Rock, and turning aside, he was not
to be found, nor did he return to his own
place until the disease had spent itself,
and half the children of the campoodie
were in their shallow graves with beads
sprinkled over them.

It is possible the tale of Winnenap"s
97

SHOSHONE LAND

patients had not been strictly kept. There
had not been a medicine-man killed in
the valley for twelve years, and for that the
perpetrators had been severely punished
by the whites. The winter of the Big
Snow an epidemic of pneumonia carried
off the Indians with scarcely a warning ;
from the lake northward to the lava flats
they died in the sweat-houses, and under
the hands of the medicine-men. Even the
drugs of the white physician had no power.
After two weeks of this plague the Pai-
utes drew to council to consider the re-
missness of their medicine-men. They
were sore with grief and afraid for them-
selves ; as a result of the council, one in
every campoodie was sentenced to the an-
cient penalty. But schooling and native
shrewdness had raised up in the younger
men an unfaith in old usages, so judgment
98

ARRIVAL OF THE EXECUTIONERS

SHOSHONE LAND

halted between sentence and execution.
At Three Pines the government teacher
brought out influential whites to threaten
and cajole the stubborn tribes. At Tuna-
wai the conservatives sent into Nevada for
that pacific old humbug, Johnson Sides,
most notable of Paiute orators, to harangue
his people. Citizens of the towns turned
out with food and comforts, and so after a
season the trouble passed.

But here at Maverick there was no
school, no oratory, and no alleviation.
One third of the campoodie died, and the
rest killed the medicine-men. Winnenap'
expected it, and for days walked and sat a
little apart from his family that he might
meet it as became a Shoshone, no doubt
suffering the agony of dread deferred.
When finally three men came and sat at
his fire without greeting he knew his time.
99

SHOSHONE LAND

He turned a little from them, dropped his
chin upon his knees, and looked out over
Shoshone Land, breathing evenly. The
women went into the wickiup and covered
their heads with their blankets.

So much has the Indian lost of savage-
ness by merely desisting from killing, that
the executioners braved themselves to their
work by drinking and a show of quarrel-
someness. In the end a sharp hatchet-
stroke discharged the duty of the cam-
poodie. Afterward his women buried him,
and a warm wind coming out of the south,
the force of the disease was broken, and
even they acquiesced in the wisdom of
the tribe. That summer they told me all
except the names of the Three.

Since it appears that we make our own
heaven here, no doubt we shall have a
hand in the heaven of hereafter; and I

100

SHOSHONE LAND

know what Winnenap"s will be like:
worth going to if one has leave to live in
it according to his liking. It will be tawny
gold underfoot, walled up with jacinth and
jasper, ribbed with chalcedony, and yet no
hymn-book heaven, but the free air and
free spaces of Shoshone Land.

,^S Jr\

-__^^-^^^^^:^-^___

•j^iw^s^Ei^k.

JIMVILLE

A BRET HARTE TOWN

JIMVILLE

A BRET HARTE TOWN

WHEN Mr. Harte found himself with
a fresh palette and his particular
local color fading from the West, he did
what he considered the only safe thing, and
carried his young impression away to be
worked out untroubled by any newer fact.
He should have gone to Jimville. There he
would have found cast up on the ore-ribbed
hills the bleached timbers of more tales, and
better ones.

You could not think of Jimville as any-
thing more than a survival, like the herb-
eating, bony-cased old tortoise that pokes
cheerfully about those borders some thou-
sands of years beyond his proper epoch.
105

JIMVILLE

Not that Jimville is old, but it has an at-
mosphere favorable to the type of a half
century back, if not " forty-niners," of that
breed. It is said of Jimville that getting
away from it is such a piece of work that it
encourages permanence in the population ;
the fact is that most have been drawn there
by some real likeness or liking. Not how-
ever that I would deny the difficulty of get-
ting into or out of that cove of reminder, I
who have made the journey so many times
at great pains of a poor body. Any way
you go at it, Jimville is about three days
from anywhere in particular. North or
south, after the railroad there is a stage
journey of such interminable monotony as
induces forgetfulness of all previous states
of existence.

The road to Jimville is the happy hunt-
ing ground of old stage-coaches bought
106

JIMVILLE

up from superseded routes the West over,
rocking, lumbering, wide vehicles far gone
in the odor of romance, coaches that Vas-
quez has held up, from whose high seats
express messengers have shot or been shot
as their luck held. This is to comfort you
when the driver stops to rummage for wire
to mend a failing bolt. There is enough
of this sort of thing to quite prepare you
to believe what the driver insists, namely,
that all that country and Jimville are held
together by wire.

First on the way to Jimville you cross a
lonely open land, with a hint in the sky of
things going on under the horizon, a pal-
pitant, white, hot land where the wheels
gird at the sand and the midday heaven
shuts it in breathlessly like a tent. So in
still weather ; and when the wind blows
there is occupation enough for the passen-
107

JIMVILLE

gers, shifting seats to hold down the wind-
ward side of the wagging coach. This is
a mere trifle. The Jimville stage is built
for five passengers, but when you have
seven, with four trunks, several parcels,
three sacks of grain, the mail and express,
you begin to understand that proverb
about the road which has been reported
to you. In time you learn to engage the
high seat beside the driver, where you
get good air and the best company. Be-
yond the desert rise the lava flats, scoriae
strewn ; sharp-cutting walls of narrow ca-
nons ; league-wide, frozen puddles of black
rock, intolerable and forbidding. Beyond
the lava the mouths that spewed it out,
ragged-lipped, ruined craters shouldering
to the cloud-line, mostly of red earth, as
red as a red heifer. These have some
comforting of shrubs and grass. You get
1 08

JIMVILLE

the very spirit of the meaning of that
country when you see Little Pete feeding
his sheep in the red, choked maw of an old
vent, — a kind of silly pastoral gentleness
that glozes over an elemental violence.
Beyond the craters rise worn, auriferous
hills of a quiet sort, tumbled together; a
valley full of mists ; whitish green scrub ;
and bright, small, panting lizards ; then
Jimville.

The town looks to have spilled out of
Squaw Gulch, and that, in fact, is the se-
quence of its growth. It began around
the Bully Boy and Theresa group of mines
midway up Squaw Gulch, spreading down
to the smelter at the mouth of the ravine.
The freight wagons dumped their loads as
near to the mill as the slope allowed, and
Jimville grew in between. Above the
Gulch begins a pine wood with sparsely
109

JIMVILLE

grown thickets of lilac, azalea, and odorous
blossoming shrubs.

Squaw Gulch is a very sharp, steep,
ragged-walled ravine, and that part of Jim-
ville which is built in it has only one
street, — in summer paved with bone-
white cobbles, in the wet months a frothy
yellow flood. All between the ore dumps
and solitary small cabins, pieced out with
tin cans and packing cases, run footpaths
drawing down to the Silver Dollar saloon.
When Jimville was having the time of its
life the Silver Dollar had those same coins
let into the bar top for a border, but the
proprietor pried them out when the glory
departed. There are three hundred in-
habitants in Jimville and four bars, though
you are not to argue anything from that.

Hear now how Jimville came by its
name. Jim Calkins discovered the Bully
no

JIMVILLE

Boy, Jim Baker located the Theresa.
When Jim Jenkins opened an eating-
house in his tent he chalked up on the
flap, " Best meals in Jimville, $1.00," and
the name stuck.

There was more human interest in the
origin of Squaw Gulch, though it tickled
no humor. It was Dimmick's squaw from
Aurora way. If Dimmick had been any-
thing except New Englander he would
have called her a mahala, but that would
not have bettered his behavior. Dimmick
made a strike, went East, and the squaw
who had been to him as his wife took to
drink. That was the bald way of stating
it in the Aurora country. The milk of
human kindness, like some wine, must not
be uncorked too much in speech lest it
lose savor. This is what they did. The
woman would have returned to her own
in

JIMVILLE

people, being far gone with child, but the
drink worked her bane. By the river of
this ravine her pains overtook her. There
Jim Calkins, prospecting, found her dying
with a three days' babe nozzling at her
breast. Jim heartened her for the end,
buried her, and walked back to Poso,
eighteen miles, the child poking in the
folds of his denim shirt with small mewing
noises, and won support for it from the
rough-handed folks of that place. Then
he came back to Squaw Gulch, so named
from that day, and discovered the Bully
Boy. Jim humbly regarded this piece of
luck as interposed for his reward, and I
for one believed him. If it had been in
mediaeval times you would have had a
legend or a ballad. Bret Harte would
have given you a tale. You see in me a
mere recorder, for I know what is best for
112

JIMVILLE

you ; you shall blow out this bubble from
your own breath.

You could never get into any proper re-
lation to Jimville unless you could slough
off and swallow your acquired prejudices
as a lizard does his skin. Once wanting
some womanly attentions, the stage-driver
assured me I might have them at the Nine-
Mile House from the lady barkeeper. The
phrase tickled all my after-dinner-coffee
sense of humor into an anticipation of
Poker Flat. The stage-driver proved him-
self really, right, though you are not to sup-
pose from this that Jimville had no conven-
tions and no caste. They work out these
things in the personal equation largely.
Almost every latitude of behavior is al-
lowed a good fellow, one no liar, a free
spender, and a backer of his friends' quar-
rels. You are respected in as much

JIMVILLE

ground as you can shoot over, in as many
pretensions as you can make good.

That probably explains Mr. Fanshawe,
the gentlemanly faro dealer of those parts,
built for the role of Oakhurst, going white-
shirted and frock-coated in a community
of overalls ; and persuading you that what-
ever shifts and tricks of the game were
laid to his deal, he could not practice them
on a person of your penetration. But he
does. By his own account and the evi-
dence of his manners he had been bred
for a clergyman, and he certainly has gifts
for the part. You find him always in pos-
session of your point of view, and with
an evident though not obtrusive desire to
stand well with you. For an account of
his killings, for his way with women and
the way of women with him, I refer you
to Brown of Calaveras and some others of
114

JIMVILLE

that stripe. His improprieties had a cer-
tain sanction of long standing not accorded
to the gay ladies who wore Mr. Fanshawe's
favors. There were perhaps too many of
them. On the whole, the point of the
moral distinctions of Jimville appears to
be a point of honor, with an absence
of humorous appreciation that strangers
mistake for dullness. At Jimville they
see behavior as history and judge it by
facts, untroubled by invention and the dra-
matic sense. You glimpse a crude equity
in their dealings with Wilkins, who had
shot a man at Lone Tree, fairly, in an
open quarrel. Rumor of it reached Jim-
ville before Wilkins rested there in flight.
I saw Wilkins, all Jimville saw him ; in
fact, he came into the Silver Dollar when
we were holding a church fair and bought
a pink silk pincushion. I have often
"5

JIMVILLE

wondered what became of it. Some of us
shook hands with him, not because we did
not know, but because we had not been
officially notified, and there were those
present who knew how it was themselves.
When the sheriff arrived Wilkins had
moved on, and Jimville organized a posse
and brought him back, because the sheriff
was a Jimville man and we had to stand
by him.

I said we had the church fair at the
Silver Dollar. We had most things there,
dances, town meetings, and the kineto-
scope exhibition of the Passion Play. The
Silver Dollar had been built when the
borders of Jimville spread from Minton to
the red hill the Defiance twisted through.
"Side-Winder" Smith scrubbed the floor
for us and moved the bar to the back room.
The fair was designed for the support of
116

JIMVILLE

the circuit rider who preached to the few
that would hear, and buried us all in turn.
He was the symbol of Jimville's respecta-
bility, although he was of a sect that held
dancing among the cardinal sins. The
management took no chances on offending
the minister; at 11.30 they tendered him
the receipts of the evening in the chair-
man's hat, as a delicate intimation that the
fair was closed. The company filed out of
the front door and around to the back.
Then the dance began formally with no
feelings hurt. These wrere the sort of cour-
tesies, common enough in Jimville, that
brought tears of delicate inner laughter.

There were others besides Mr. Fanshawe
who had walked out of Mr. Harte's demesne
to Jimville and wore names that smacked
of the soil, — "Alkali Bill," "Pike" Wil-
son, " Three Finger," and " Mono Jim ; "
117

JIMVILLE

fierce, shy, profane, sun-dried derelicts of
the windy hills, who each owned, or had
owned, a mine and was wishful to own one
again. They laid up on the worn benches
of the Silver Dollar or the Same Old Luck
like beached vessels, and their talk ran on
endlessly of " strike " and " contact " and
" mother lode," and worked around to
fights and hold-ups, villainy, haunts, and
the hoodoo of the Minietta, told austerely
without imagination.

Do not suppose I am going to repeat it
all ; you who want these things written up
from the point of view of people who do
not do them every day would get no savor
in their speech.

Says Three Finger, relating the history
of the Mariposa, " I took it off'n Tom
Beatty, cheap, after his brother Bill was
shot."

118

JIMVILLE

Says Jim Jenkins, " What was the mat-
ter of him ? "

" Who ? Bill ? Abe Johnson shot him ;
he was fooling around Johnson's wife, an'
Tom sold me the mine dirt cheap."

" Why did n't he work it himself? "

" Him ? Oh, he was laying for Abe and
calculated to have to leave the country
pretty quick."

" Huh ! " says Jim Jenkins, and the tale
flows smoothly on.

Yearly the spring fret floats the loose
population of Jimville out into the desolate
waste hot lands, guiding by the peaks and
a few rarely touched water-holes, always,
always with the golden hope. They de-
velop prospects and grow rich, develop oth-
ers and grow poor but never embittered.
Say the hills, It is all one, there is gold
enough, time enough, and men enough to
119

JIMVILLE

come after you. And at Jimville they
understand the language of the hills.

Jimville does not know a great deal about
the crust of the earth, it prefers a " hunch."
That is an intimation from the gods that
if you go over a brown back of the hills, by
a dripping spring, up Coso way, you will
find what is worth while. I have never
heard that the failure of any particular
hunch disproved the principle. Somehow
the rawness of the land favors the sense
of personal relation to the supernatural.
There is not much intervention of crops,
cities, clothes, and manners between you
and the organizing forces to cut off com-
munication. All this begets in Jimville a
state that passes explanation unless you will
accept an explanation that passes belief.
Along with killing and drunkenness, covet-
ing of women, charity, simplicity, there is
1 20

JIMVILLE

a certain indifference, blankness, emptiness
if you will, of all vaporings, no bubbling of
the pot, — it wants the German to coin a
word for that, — no bread-envy, no brother-
fervor. Western writers have not sensed
it yet; they smack the savor of lawlessness
too much upon their tongues, but you have
these to witness it is not mean-spiritedness.
It is pure Greek in that it represents the
courage to sheer off what is not worth while.
Beyond that it endures without sniveling,
renounces without self-pity, fears no death,
rates itself not too great in the scheme of
things ; so do beasts, so did St. Jerome in
the desert, so also in the elder day did gods.
Life, its performance, cessation, is no new
thing to gape and wonder at.

Here you have the repose of the per-
fectly accepted instinct which includes pas-
sion and death in its perquisites. I suppose
121

JIMVILLE

that the end of all our hammering and
yawping will be something like the point
of view of Jimville. The only difference
will be in the decorations.

MY NEIGHBOR'S FIELD

MY NEIGHBOR'S FIELD

IT is one of those places God must have
meant for a field from all time, lying
very level at the foot of the slope that
crowds up against Kearsarge, falling slight-
ly toward the town. North and south it
is fenced by low old glacial ridges, boulder
strewn and untenable. Eastward it butts
on orchard closes and the village gardens,
brimming over into them by wild brier and
creeping grass. The village street, with its
double row of unlike houses, breaks off ab-
ruptly at the edge of the field in a foot-
path that goes up the streamside, beyond
it, to the source of waters.

The field is not greatly esteemed of the
town, not being put to the plough nor af-
fording firewood, but breeding all manner
125

MY NEIGHBOR S FIELD

of wild seeds that go down in the irrigating
ditches to come up as weeds in the gar-
dens and grass plots. But when I had no
more than seen it in the charm of its spring
smiling, I knew I should have no peace
until I had bought ground and built me a
house beside it, with a little wicket to go
in and out at all hours, as afterward came
about.

Edswick, Roeder, Connor, and Ruffin
owned the field before it fell to my neigh-
bor. But before that the Paiutes, mesne
lords of the soil, made a campoodie by the
rill of Pine Creek ; and after, contesting the
soil with them, cattle-men, who found its
foodful pastures greatly to their advantage ;
and bands of blethering flocks shepherded
by wild, hairy men of little speech, who at-
tested their rights to the feeding ground
with their long staves upon each other's
126

MY NEIGHBORS FIELD

skulls. Edswick homesteaded the field
about the time the wild tide of mining life
was roaring and rioting up Kearsarge, and
where the village now stands built a stone
hut, with loopholes to make good his claim
against cattle-men or Indians. But Eds-
wick died and Roeder became master of the
field. Roeder owned cattle on a thousand
hills, and made it a recruiting ground for
his bellowing herds before beginning the
long drive to market across a shifty desert.
He kept the field fifteen years, and after-
ward falling into difficulties, put it out as
security against certain sums. Connor,
who held the securities, was cleverer than
Roeder and not so busy. The money fell
due the winter of the Big Snow, when all
the trails were forty feet under drifts, and
Roeder was away in San Francisco selling
his cattle. At the set time Connor took
127

MY NEIGHBORS FIELD

the law by the forelock and was adjudged
possession of the field. Eighteen days
later Roeder arrived on snowshoes, both
feet frozen, and the money in his pack.
In the long suit at law ensuing, the field
fell to Ruffin, that clever one-armed lawyer
with the tongue to wile a bird out of the
bush, Connor's counsel, and was sold by
him to my neighbor, whom from envying
his possession I call Naboth.

Curiously, all this human occupancy of
greed and mischief left no mark on the
field, but the Indians did, and the unthink-
ing sheep. Round its corners children
pick up chipped arrow points of obsidian,
scattered through it are kitchen middens
and pits of old sweat - houses. By the
south corner, where the campoodie stood,
is a single shrub of "hoopee" (LyciumAn-
dersonii), maintaining itself hardly among
128

MY NEIGHBORS FIELD

alien shrubs, and near by, three low rakish
trees of hackberry, so far from home that
no prying of mine has been able to find an-
other in any canon east or west. But the
berries of both were food for the Paiutes,
eagerly sought and traded for as far south
as Shoshone Land. By the fork of the
creek where the shepherds camp is a single
clump of mesquite of the variety called
" screw bean." The seed must have shaken
there from some sheep's coat, for this is
not the habitat of mesquite, and except for
other single shrubs at sheep camps, none
grows freely for a hundred and fifty miles
south or east.

Naboth has put a fence about the best
of the field, but neither the Indians nor
the shepherds can quite forego it. They
make camp and build their wattled huts
about the borders of it, and no doubt they
129

MY NEIGHBORS FIELD

have some sense of home in its familiar
aspect

As I have said, it is a low-lying field,
between the mesa and the town, with no
hillocks in it, but a gentle swale where
the waste water of the creek goes down to
certain farms, and the hackberry-trees, of
which the tallest might be three times the
height of a man, are the tallest things in
it. A mile up from the water gate that
turns the creek into supply pipes for the
town, begins a row of long-leaved pines,
threading the watercourse to the foot of
Kearsarge. These are the pines that puz-
zle the local botanist, not easily determined,
and unrelated to other conifers of the Si-
erra slope ; the same pines of which the
Indians relate a legend mixed of brother-
liness and the retribution of God. Once
the pines possessed the field, as the worn
130

MY NEIGHBORS FIELD

stumps of them along the streamside show,
and it would seem their secret purpose
to regain their old footing. Now and
then some seedling escapes the devastating
sheep a rod or two down-stream. Since I
came to live by the field one of these has
tiptoed above the gully of the creek, beck-
oning the procession from the hills, as if
in fact they would make back toward that
skyward-pointing finger of granite on the
opposite range, from which, according to
the legend, when they were bad Indians
and it a great chief, they ran away. This
year the summer floods brought the round,
brown, fruitful cones to my very door, and
I look, if I live long enough, to see them
come up greenly in my neighbor's field.

It is interesting to watch this retaking
of old ground by the wild plants, banished
by human use. Since Naboth drew his

MY NEIGHBOR'S FIELD

fence about the field and restricted it to a
few wild-eyed steers, halting between the
hills and the shambles, many old habitues
of the field have come back to their haunts.
The willow and brown birch, long ago cut
off by the Indians for wattles, have come
back to the streamside, slender and vir-
ginal in their spring greenness, and leaving
long stretches of the brown water open to
the sky. In stony places where no grass
grows, wild olives sprawl ; close-twigged,
blue-gray patches in winter, more translu-
cent greenish gold in spring than any
aureole. Along with willow and birch and
brier, the clematis, that shyest plant of
water borders, slips down season by season
to within a hundred yards of the village
street. Convinced after three years that
it would come no nearer, we spent time
fruitlessly pulling up roots to plant in the
132

MY NEIGHBOR S FIELD

garden. All this while, when no coaxing
or care prevailed upon any transplanted
slip to grow, one was coming up silently
outside the fence near the wicket, coiling
so secretly in the rabbit-brush that its pre-
sence was never suspected until it flowered
delicately along its twining length. The
horehound comes through the fence and
under it, shouldering the pickets off the
railings ; the brier rose mines under the
horehound ; and no care, though I own I
am not a close weeder, keeps the small
pale moons of the primrose from rising to
the night moth under my apple-trees. The
first summer in the new place, a clump of
cypripediums came up by the irrigating
ditch at the bottom of the lawn. But the
clematis will not come inside, nor the wild
almond.

I have forgotten to find out, though I
133

MY NEIGHBORS FIELD

meant to, whether the wild almond grew
in that country where Moses kept the
flocks of his father-in-law, but if so one can
account for the burning bush. It comes
upon one with a flame-burst as of revela-
tion ; little hard red buds on leafless twigs,
swelling unnoticeably, then one, two, or
three strong suns, and from tip to tip one
soft fiery glow, whispering with bees as a
singing flame. A twig of finger size will
be furred to the thickness of one's wrist
by pink five-petaled bloom, so close that
only the blunt-faced wild bees find their
way in it. In this latitude late frosts cut
off the hope of fruit too often for the wild
almond to multiply greatly, but the spiny,
tap-rooted shrubs are resistant to most
plant evils.

It is not easy always to be attentive to
the maturing of wild fruit. Plants are so
134

MY NEIGHBORS FIELD

unobtrusive in their material processes, and
always at the significant moment some
other bloom has reached its perfect hour.
One can never fix the precise moment
when the rosy tint the field has from the
wild almond passes into the inspiring blue
of lupines. One notices here and there a
spike of bloom, and a day later the whole
field royal and ruffling lightly to the wind.
Part of the charm of the lupine is the con-
tinual stir of its plumes to airs not sus-
pected otherwhere. Go and stand by any
crown of bloom and the tall stalks do but
rock a little as for drowsiness, but look off
across the field, and on the stillest days
there is always a trepidation in the purple
patches.

From midsummer until frost the pre-
vailing note of the field is clear gold, pass-
ing into the rusty tone of bigelovia going
135

MY NEIGHBOR S FIELD

into a decline, a succession of color
schemes more admirably managed than
the transformation scene at the theatre.
Under my window a colony of cleome
made a soft web of bloom that drew me
every morning for a long still time ; and
one day I discovered that I was looking
into a rare fretwork of fawn and straw col-
ored twigs from which both bloom and
leaf had gone, and I could not say if it had
been for a matter of weeks or days. The
time to plant cucumbers and set out cab-
bages may be set down in the almanac,
but never seed-time nor blossom in Na-
both's field.

Certain winged and mailed denizens of
the field seem to reach their heyday along
with the plants they most affect. In June
the leaning towers of the white milkweed
are jeweled over with red and gold beetles,
136

MY NEIGHBORS FIELD

climbing dizzily. This is that milkweed
from whose stems the Indians flayed fibre
to make snares for small game, but what
use the beetles put it to except for a dis-
playing ground for their gay coats, I could
never discover. The white butterfly crop
comes on with the bigelovia bloom, and on
warm mornings makes an airy twinkling
all across the field. In September young
linnets grow out of the rabbit-brush in the
night. All the nests discoverable in the
neighboring orchards will not account for
the numbers of them. Somewhere, by the
same secret process by which the field
matures a million more seeds than it
needs, it is maturing red-hooded linnets
for their devouring. All the purlieus of
bigelovia and artemisia are noisy with
them for a month. Suddenly as they come
as suddenly go the fly-by-nights, that pitch
i37

MY NEIGHBORS FIELD

and toss on dusky barred wings above the
field of summer twilights. Never one of
these nighthawks will you see after linnet
time, though the hurtle of their wings
makes a pleasant sound across the dusk in
their season.

For two summers a great red-tailed
hawk has visited the field every afternoon
between three and four o'clock, swooping
and soaring with the airs of a gentleman
adventurer. What he finds there is chiefly
conjectured, so secretive are the little peo-
ple of Naboth's field. Only when leaves
fall and the light is low and slant, one sees
the long clean flanks of the jackrabbits,
leaping like small deer, and of late after-
noons little cotton-tails scamper in the
runways. But the most one sees of the
burrowers, gophers, and mice is the fresh
earthwork of their newly opened doors, or
138

MY NEIGHBORS FIELD

the pitiful small shreds the butcher-bird
hangs on spiny shrubs.

It is a still field, this of my neighbor's,
though so busy, and admirably com-
pounded for variety and pleasantness, —
a little sand, a little loam, a grassy plot, a
stony rise or two, a full brown stream, a
little touch of humanness, a footpath trod-
den out by moccasins. Naboth expects to
make town lots of it and his fortune in
one and the same day; but when I take
the trail to talk with old Seyavi at the
campoodie, it occurs to me that though
the field may serve a good turn in those
days it will hardly be happier. No, cer-
tainly not happier.

THE MESA TRAIL

THE MESA TRAIL

THE mesa trail begins in the cam-
poodie at the corner of Naboth's field,
though one may drop into it from the wood
road toward the canon, or from any of the
cattle paths that go up along the stream-
side; a clean, pale, smooth -trodden way
between spiny shrubs, comfortably wide
for a horse or an Indian. .It begins, I say,
at the campoodie, and goes on toward the
twilight hills and the borders of Shoshone
Land. It strikes diagonally across the foot
of the hill -slope from the field until it
reaches the larkspur level, and holds south
along the front of Oppapago, having the
high ranges to the right and the foothills
and the great Bitter Lake below it on the
left. The mesa holds very level .here, cut
143

THE MESA TRAIL

across at intervals by the deep washes of
dwindling streams, and its treeless spaces
uncramp the soul.

Mesa trails were meant to be traveled
on horseback, at the jigging coyote trot
that only western-bred horses learn suc-
cessfully. A foot-pace carries one too
slowly past the units in a decorative
scheme that is on a scale with the country
round for bigness. It takes days' jour-
neys to give a note of variety to the
country of the social shrubs. These chiefly
clothe the benches and eastern foot-slopes
of the Sierras, — great spreads of artemisia,
coleogyne, and spinosa, suffering no other
woody stemmed thing in their purlieus ;
this by election apparently, with no el-
bowing ; and the several shrubs have each
their clientele of flowering herbs. It would
be worth knowing how much the devastat-
144

THE MESA TRAIL

ing sheep have had to do with driving the
tender plants to the shelter of the prickle-
bushes. It might have begun earlier, in
the time Seyavi of the campoodie tells of,
when antelope ran on the mesa like sheep
for numbers, but scarcely any foot-high
herb rears itself except from the midst of
some stout twigged shrub ; larkspur in the
coleogyne, and for every spinosa the pur-
pling coils of phacelia. In the shrub shel-
ter, in the season, flock the little stemless
things whose blossom time is as short as a
marriage song. The larkspurs make the
best showing, being tall and sweet, sway-
ing a little above the shrubbery, scattering
pollen dust which Navajo brides gather to
fill their marriage baskets. This were an
easier task than to find two of them of a
shade. Larkspurs in the botany are blue,
but if you were to slip rein to the stub of
MS

THE MESA TRAIL

some black sage and set about proving it
you would be still at it by the hour when
the white gilias set their pale disks to the
westering sun. This is the gilia the chil-
dren call " evening snow," and it is no use
trying to improve on children's names for
wild flowers.

From the height of a horse you look
down to clean spaces in a shifty yellow
soil, bare to the eye as a newly sanded
floor. Then as soon as ever the hill shad-
ows begin to swell out from the sidelong
ranges, come little flakes of whiteness flut-
tering at the edge of the sand. By dusk
there are tiny drifts in the lee of every
strong shrub, rosy-tipped corollas as riot-
ous in the sliding mesa wind as if they
were real flakes shaken out of a cloud, not
sprung from the ground on wiry three-
inch stems. They keep awake all night,
146

THE MESA TRAIL

and all the air is heavy and musky sweet
because of them.

Farther south on the trail there will be
poppies meeting ankle deep, and singly,
peacock-painted bubbles of calochortus
blown out at the tops of tall stems. But
before the season is in tune for the gayer
blossoms the best display of color is in the
lupin wash. There is always a lupin wash
somewhere on a mesa trail, — a broad, shal-
low, cobble-paved sink of vanished waters,
where the hummocks of Lupinus ornatus
run a delicate gamut from silvery green of
spring to silvery white of winter foliage.
They look in fullest leaf, except for color,
most like the huddled huts of the cam-
poodie, and the largest of them might be a
man's length in diameter. In their season,
which is after the gilias are at their best,
and before the larkspurs are ripe for pollen
147

THE MESA TRAIL

gathering, every terminal whorl of the
lupin sends up its blossom stalk, not hold-
ing any constant blue, but paling and
purpling to guide the friendly bee to vir-
ginal honey sips, or away from the per-
fected and depleted flower. The length of
the blossom stalk conforms to the rounded
contour of the plant, and of these there
will be a million moving indescribably in
the airy current that flows down the swale
of the wash.

There is always a little wind on the
mesa, a sliding current of cooler air going
down the face of the mountain of its own
momentum, but not to disturb the silence
of great space. Passing the wide mouths of
canons, one gets the effect of whatever is
doing in them, openly or behind a screen of
cloud, — thunder of falls, wind in the pine
leaves, or rush and roar of rain. The rumor
148

THE MESA TRAIL

of tumult grows and dies in passing, as
from open doors gaping on a village street,
but does not impinge on the effect of soli-
tariness. In quiet weather mesa days have
no parallel for stillness, but the night silence
breaks into certain mellow or poignant
notes. Late afternoons the burrowing owls
may be seen blinking at the doors of their
hummocks with perhaps four or five elf-
ish nestlings arow, and by twilight begin a
soft whoo-oo-ing, rounder, sweeter, more in-
cessant in mating time. It is not possible
to disassociate the call of the burrowing
owl from the late slant light of the mesa.
If the fine vibrations which are the golden-
violet glow of spring twilights were to
tremble into sound, it would be just that
mellow double note breaking along the
blossom-tops. While the glow holds one
sees the thistle-down flights and pouncings
149

THE MESA TRAIL

after prey, and on into the dark hears their
svit pus-ssk ! clearing out of the trail ahead.
Maybe the pin-point shriek of field mouse
or kangaroo rat that pricks the wakeful
pauses of the night is extorted by these
mellow-voiced plunderers, though it is just
as like to be the work of the red fox on his
twenty-mile constitutional.

Both the red fox and the coyote are free
of the night hours, and both killers for the
pure love of slaughter. The fox is no great
talker, but the coyote goes garrulously
through the dark in twenty keys at once,
gossip, warning, and abuse. They are light
treaders, the split-feet, so that the solitary
camper sees their eyes about him in the
dark sometimes, and hears the soft intake
of breath when no leaf has stirred and no
twig snapped underfoot. The coyote is
your real lord of the mesa, and so he makes
150

THE MESA TRAIL

sure you are armed with no long black in-
strument to spit your teeth into his vitals at
a thousand yards, is both bold and curious.
Not so bold, however, as the badger and
not so much of a curmudgeon. This short-
legged meat-eater loves half lights and
lowering days, has no friends, no enemies,
and disowns his offspring. Very likely if
he knew how hawk and crow dog him for
dinners, he would resent it. But the badger
is not very well contrived for looking up
or far to either side. Dull afternoons he
may be met nosing a trail hot-foot to the
home of ground rat or squirrel, and is with
difficulty persuaded to give the right of
way. The badger is a pot-hunter and no
sportsman. Once at the hill, he dives for
the central chamber, his sharp-clawed,
splayey feet splashing up the sand like a
bather in the surf. He is a swift trailer,

THE MESA TRAIL

but not so swift or secretive but some small
sailing hawk or lazy crow, perhaps one or
two of each, has spied upon him and come
drifting down the wind to the killing.

No burrower is so unwise as not to have
several exits from his dwelling under pro-
tecting shrubs. When the badger goes
down, as many of the furry people as are
not caught napping come up by the back
doors, and the hawks make short work of
them. I suspect that the crows get no-
thing but the gratification of curiosity and
the pickings of some secret store of seeds
unearthed by the badger. Once the ex-
cavation begins they walk about expec-
tantly, but the little gray hawks beat slow
circles about the doors of exit, and are
wiser in their generation, though they do
not look it.

There are always solitary hawks sailing
152

THE MESA TRAIL

above the mesa, and where some blue tower
of silence lifts out of the neighboring range,
an eagle hanging dizzily, and always buz-
zards high up in the thin, translucent air
making a merry-go-round. Between the
coyote and the birds of carrion the mesa is
kept clear of miserable dead.

The wind, too, is a besom over the tree-
less spaces, whisking new sand over the lit-
ter of the scant-leaved shrubs, and the little
doorways of the burro we rs are as trim as
city fronts. It takes man to leave unsightly
scars on the face of the earth. Here on
the mesa the abandoned campoodies of the
Paiutes are spots of desolation long after
the wattles of the huts have warped in the
brush heaps. The campoodies are near
the watercourses, but never in the swale
of the stream. The Paiute seeks rising
ground, depending on air and sun for puri-
153

THE MESA TRAIL

fication of his dwelling, and when it be-
comes wholly untenable, moves.

A campoodie at noontime, when there
is no smoke rising and no stir of life, re-
sembles nothing so much as a collection
of prodigious wasps' nests. The huts are
squat and brown and chimneyless, facing
east, and the inhabitants have the faculty
of quail for making themselves scarce in
the underbrush at the approach of stran-
gers. But they are really not often at
home during midday, only the blind and
incompetent left to keep the camp. These
are working hours, and all across the mesa
one sees the women whisking seeds of chia
into their spoon-shaped baskets, these emp-
tied again into the huge conical carriers,
supported on the shoulders by a leather
band about the forehead.

Mornings and late afternoons one meets

THE MESA TRAIL

the men singly and afoot on unguessable er-
rands, or riding shaggy, browbeaten ponies,
with game slung across the saddle-bows.
This might be deer or even antelope, rab-
bits, or, very far south towards Shoshone
Land, lizards.

There are myriads of lizards on the mesa,
little gray darts, or larger salmon-sided ones
that may be found swallowing their skins in
the safety of a prickle-bush in early spring.
Now and then a palm's breadth of the trail
gathers itself together and scurries off with
a little rustle under the brush, to resolve
itself into sand again. This is pure witch-
craft. If you succeed in catching it in
transit, it loses its power and becomes a
flat, horned, toad-like creature, horrid look-
ing and harmless, of the color of the soil ;
and the curio dealer will give you two bits
for it, to stuff.

THE MESA TRAIL

Men have their season on the mesa as
much as plants and four-footed things, and
one is not like to meet them out of their
time. For example, at the time of rodeos,
which is perhaps April, one meets free rid-
ing vaqueros who need no trails and can
find cattle where to the layman no cattle
exist. As early as February bands of sheep
work up from the south to the high Si-
erra pastures. It appears that shepherds
have not changed more than sheep in the
process of time. The shy hairy men who
herd the tractile flocks might be, except
for some added clothing, the very brethren
of David. Of necessity they are hardy,
simple livers, superstitious, fearful, given to
seeing visions, and almost without speech.
It needs the bustle of shearings and copi-
ous libations of sour, weak wine to re-
store the human faculty. Petite Pete, who
156

THE MESA TRAIL

works a circuit up from the Ceriso to Red
Butte and around by way of Salt Flats,
passes year by year on the mesa trail,
his thick hairy chest thrown open to all
weathers, twirling his long staff, and deal-
ing brotherly with his dogs, who are pos-
sibly as intelligent, certainly handsomer.

A flock's journey is seven miles, ten if
pasture fails, in a windless blur of dust,
feeding as it goes, and resting at noons.
Such hours Pete weaves a little screen of
twigs between his head and the sun — the
rest of him is as impervious as one of his
own sheep — and sleeps while his dogs
have the flocks upon their consciences. At
night, wherever he may be, there Pete
camps, and fortunate the trail-weary trav-
eler who falls in with him. When the
fire kindles and savory meat seethes in the
pot, when there is a drowsy blether from
157

THE MESA TRAIL

the flock, and far down the mesa the twi-
light twinkle of shepherd fires, when there
is a hint of blossom underfoot and a hea-
venly whiteness on the hills, one harks back
without effort to Judaea and the Nativity.
But one feels by day anything but good
will to note the shorn shrubs and cropped
blossom-tops. So many seasons' effort, so
many suns and rains to make a pound of
wool ! And then there is the loss of
ground-inhabiting birds that must fail from
the mesa when few herbs ripen seed.

Out West, the west of the mesas and
the unpatented hills, there is more sky
than any place in the world. It does not
sit flatly on the rim of earth, but begins
somewhere out in the space in which the
earth is poised, hollows more, and is full
of clean winey winds. There are some
odors, too, that get into the blood. There
158

THE MESA TRAIL

is the spring smell of sage that is the
warning that sap is beginning to work in
a soil that looks to have none of the juices
of life in it; it is the sort of smell that
sets one thinking what a long furrow the
plough would turn up here, the sort of
smell that is the beginning of new leafage,
is best at the plant's best, and leaves a pun-
gent trail where wild cattle crop. There is
the smell of sage at sundown, burning sage
from campoodies and sheep camps, that
travels on the thin blue wraiths of smoke ;
the kind of smell that gets into the hair
and garments, is not much liked except
upon long acquaintance, and every Paiute
and shepherd smells of it indubitably.
There is the palpable smell of the bitter
dust that comes up from the alkali flats at
the end of the dry seasons, and the smell
of rain from the wide-mouthed canons.
159

THE MESA TRAIL

And last the smell of the salt grass coun-
try, which is the beginning of other things
that are the end of the mesa trail.

THE BASKET MAKER

THE BASKET MAKER

A MAN," says Seyavi of the campoodie,
" must have a woman, but a woman
who has a child will do very well."

That was perhaps why, when she lost
her mate in the dying struggle of his race,
she never took another, but set her wit to
fend for herself and her young son. No
doubt she was often put to it in the begin-
ning to find food for them both. The
Paiutes had made their last stand at the
border of the Bitter Lake ; battle-driven
they died in its waters, and the land filled
with cattle-men and adventurers for gold :
this while Seyavi and the boy lay up in
the caverns of the Black Rock and ate tule
roots and fresh-water clams that they dug
out of the slough bottoms with their toes.
163

THE BASKET MAKER

In the interim, while the tribes swallowed
their defeat, and before the rumor of war
died out, they must have come very near
to the bare core of things. That was the
time Seyavi learned the sufficiency of
mother wit, and how much more easily one
can do without a man than might at first
be supposed.

To understand the fashion of any life,
one must know the land it is lived in and
the procession of the year. This valley is
a narrow one, a mere trough between hills,
a draught for storms, hardly a crow's flight
from the sharp Sierras of the Snows to the
curled, red and ochre, uncomforted, bare
ribs of Waban. Midway of the groove runs
a burrowing, dull river, nearly a hundred
miles from where it cuts the lava flats of
the north to its widening in a thick, tide-
less pool of a lake. Hereabouts the ranges
164

THE BASKET MAKER

have no foothills, but rise up steeply from
the bench lands above the river. Down
from the Sierras, for the east ranges have
almost no rain, pour glancing white floods
toward the lowest land, and all beside them
lie the campoodies, brown wattled brush
heaps, looking east.

In the river are mussels, and reeds that
have edible white roots, and in the soddy
meadows tubers of joint grass ; all these at
their best in the spring. On the slope the
summer growth affords seeds ; up the steep
the one-leafed pines, an oily nut. That
was really all they could depend upon, and
that only at the mercy of the little gods of
frost and rain. For the rest it was cunning
against cunning, caution against skill,
against quacking hordes of wild-fowl in the
tulares, against pronghorn and bighorn and
deer. You can guess, however, that all
165

THE BASKET MAKER

this warring of rifles and bowstrings, this
influx of overlording whites, had made
game wilder and hunters fearful of being
hunted. You can surmise also, for it was
a crude time and the land was raw, that the
women became in turn the game of the
conquerors.

There used to be in the Little Antelope
a she dog, stray or outcast, that had a lit-
ter in some forsaken lair, and ranged and
foraged for them, slinking savage and
afraid, remembering and mistrusting hu-
mankind, wistful, lean, and sufficient for
her young. I have thought Seyavi might
have had days like that, and have had per-
fect leave to think, since she will not talk
of it. Paiutes have the art of reducing
life to its lowest ebb and yet saving it alive
on grasshoppers, lizards, and strange herbs;
and that time must have left no shift un-
166

THE BASKET MAKER

tried. It lasted long enough for Seyavi to
have evolved the philosophy of life which
I have set down at the beginning. She
had gone beyond learning to do for her son,
and learned to believe it worth while.

In our kind of society, when a woman
ceases to alter the fashion of her hair, you
guess that she has passed the crisis of her
experience. If she goes on crimping and
uncrimping with the changing mode, it is
safe to suppose she has never come up
against anything too big for her. The In-
dian woman gets nearly the same personal
note in the pattern of her baskets. Not
that she does not make all kinds, carriers,
water - bottles, and cradles, — these are
kitchen ware, — but her works of art are
all of the same piece. Seyavi made flaring,
flat-bottomed bowls, cooking pots really,
when cooking was done by dropping hot
167

THE BASKET MAKER

stones into water-tight food baskets, and
for decoration a design in colored bark of
the procession of plumed crests of the valley
quail. In this pattern she had made cook-
ing pots in the golden spring of her wed-
ding year, when the quail went up two and
two to their resting places about the foot
of Oppapago. In this fashion she made
them when, after pillage, it was possible to
reinstate the housewifely crafts. Quail ran
then in the Black Rock by hundreds, —
so you will still find them in fortunate
years, — and in the famine time the women
cut their long hair to make snares when
the flocks came morning and evening to
the springs.

Seyavi made baskets for love and sold
them for money, in a generation that pre-
ferred iron pots for utility. Every Indian
woman is an artist, — sees, feels, creates,
1 68

THE BASKET MAKER

but does not philosophize about her pro-
cesses. Seyavi's bowls are wonders of
technical precision, inside and out, the
palm finds no fault with them, but the
subtlest appeal is in the sense that warns
us of humanness in the way the design
spreads into the flare of the bowl. There
used to be an Indian woman at Olancha
who made bottle-neck trinket baskets in
the rattlesnake pattern, and could accom-
modate the design to the swelling bowl and
flat shoulder of the basket without sensible
disproportion, and so cleverly that you
might own one a year without thinking how
it was done ; but Seyavi's baskets had a
touch beyond cleverness. The weaver and
the warp lived next to the earth and were
saturated with the same elements. Twice
a year, in the time of white butterflies and
again when young quail ran neck and neck
169

THE BASKET MAKER

in the chaparral, Seyavi cut willows for
basketry by the creek where it wound to-
ward the river against the sun and sucking
winds. It never quite reached the river
except in far-between times of summer
flood, but it always tried, and the willows
encouraged it as much as they could. You
nearly always found them a little farther
down than the trickle of eager water. The
Paiute fashion of counting time appeals
to me more than any other calendar. They
have no stamp of heathen gods nor great
ones, nor any succession of moons as have
red men of the East and North, but count
forward and back by the progress of the
season ; the time of taboose, before the trout
begin to leap, the end of the pinon harvest,
about the beginning of deep snows. So
they get nearer the sense of the season,
which runs early or late according as the
170

THE BASKET MAKER

rains are forward or delayed. But when-
ever Seyavi cut willows for baskets was al-
ways a golden time, and the soul of the
weather went into the wood. If you had
ever owned one of Seyavi's golden russet
cooking bowls with the pattern of plumed
quail, you would understand all this with-
out saying anything.

Before Seyavi made baskets for the sat-
isfaction of desire, — for that is a house-bred
theory of art that makes anything more of
it, — she danced and dressed her hair. In
those days, when the spring was at flood
and the blood pricked to the mating fever,
the maids chose their flowers, wreathed
themselves, and danced in the twilights,
young desire crying out to young desire.
They sang what the heart prompted, what
the flower expressed, what boded in the
mating weather.

171

THE BASKET MAKER

" And what flower did you wear, Se-
yavi?"

" I, ah, — the white flower of twining
(clematis), on my body and my hair, and so
I sang : —

" I am the white flower of twining,
Little white flower by the river,
Oh, flower that twines close by the river;
Oh, trembling flower !
So trembles the maiden heart."

So sang Seyavi of the campoodie before
she made baskets, and in her later days
laid her arms upon her knees and laughed
in them at the recollection. But it was
not often she would say so much, never
understanding the keen hunger I had for
bits of lore and the " fool talk " of her peo-
ple. She had fed her young son with
meadowlarks' tongues, to make him quick
of speech ; but in late years was loath to
172

THE BASKET MAKER

admit it, though she had come through
the period of unfaith in the lore of the clan
with a fine appreciation of its beauty and
significance.

" What good will your dead get, Seyavi,
of the baskets you burn ? " said I, coveting
them for my own collection.

Thus Seyavi, " As much good as yours
of the flowers you strew."

Oppapago looks on Waban, and Waban
on Coso and the Bitter Lake, and the cam-
poodie looks on these three ; and more,
it sees the beginning of winds along the
foot of Coso, the gathering of clouds be-
hind the high ridges, the spring flush, the
soft spread of wild almond bloom on the
mesa. These first, you understand, are
the Paiute's walls, the other his furnishings.
Not the wattled hut is his home, but the
land, the winds, the hill front, the stream.

THE BASKET MAKER

These he cannot duplicate at any furbish-
er's shop as you who live within doors,
who, if your purse allows, may have the
same home at Sitka and Samarcand. So
you see how it is that the homesickness
of an Indian is often unto death, since he
gets no relief from it; neither wind nor
weed nor sky-line, nor any aspect of the
hills of a strange land sufficiently like his
own. So it was when the government
reached out for the Paiutes, they gathered
into the Northern Reservation only such
poor tribes as could devise no other end of
their affairs. Here, all along the river, and
south to Shoshone Land, live the clans who
owned the earth, fallen into the deplorable
condition of hangers-on. Yet you hear
them laughing at the hour when they
draw in to the campoodie after labor,
when there is a smell of meat and the

THE BASKET MAKER

steam of the cooking pots goes up against
the sun. Then the children lie with their
toes in the ashes to hear tales ; then they
are merry, and have the joys of repletion
and the nearness of their kind. They have
their hills, and though jostled are suffi-
ciently free to get some fortitude for what
will come. For now you shall hear of the
end of the basket maker.

In her best days Seyavi was most like
Deborah, deep bosomed, broad in the hips,
quick in counsel, slow of speech, esteemed
of her people. This was that Seyavi who
reared a man by her own hand, her own
wit, and none other. When the towns-
people began to take note of her — and it
was some years after the war before there
began to be any towns — she was then in
the quick maturity of primitive women ; but
when I knew her she seemed already old.

THE BASKET MAKER

Indian women do not often live to great
age, though they look incredibly steeped
in years. They have the wit to win sus-
tenance from the raw material of life with-
out intervention, but they have not the
sleek look of the women whom the social
organization conspires to nourish. Seyavi
had somehow squeezed out of her daily
round a spiritual ichor that kept the skill
in her knotted fingers long after the ac-
customed time, but that also failed. By
all counts she would have been about
sixty years old when it came her turn to
sit in the dust on the sunny side of the
wickiup, with little strength left for any-
thing but looking. And in time she paid
the toll of the smoky huts and became
blind. This is a thing so long expected
by the Paiutes that when it comes they
find it neither bitter nor sweet, but toler-
176

THE BASKET MAKER

able because common. There were three
other blind women in the campoodie, with-
ered fruit on a bough, but they had mem-
ory and speech. By noon of the sun there
were never any left in the campoodie but
these or some mother of weanlings, and
they sat to keep the ashes warm upon the
hearth. If it were cold, they burrowed in
the blankets of the hut ; if it were warm,
they followed the shadow of the wickiup
around. Stir much out of their places
they hardly dared, since one might not
help another; but they called, in high, old
cracked voices, gossip and reminder across
the ash heaps.

Then, if they have your speech or you
theirs, and have an hour to spare, there
are things to be learned of life not set
down in any books, folk tales, famine tales,
love and long-suffering and desire, but no
177

THE BASKET MAKER

whimpering. Now and then one or an-
other of the blind keepers of the camp will
come across to where you sit gossiping,
tapping her way among the kitchen mid-
dens, guided by your voice that carries far
in the clearness and stillness of mesa after-
noons. But suppose you find Seyavi re-
tired into the privacy of her blanket, you
will get nothing for that day. There is
no other privacy possible in a campoodie.
All the processes of life are carried on out
of doors or behind the thin, twig-woven
walls of the wickiup, and laughter is the
only corrective for behavior. Very early
the Indian learns to possess his counte-
nance in impassivity, to cover his head with
his blanket. Something to wrap around
him is as necessary to the Paiute as to
you your closet to pray in.

So in her blanket Seyavi, sometime
178

THE BASKET MAKER

basket maker, sits by the unlit hearths of
her tribe and digests her life, nourishing
her spirit against the time of the spirit's
need, for she knows in fact quite as much
of these matters as you who have a larger
hope, though she has none but the cer-
tainty that having borne herself coura-
geously to this end she will not be reborn
a coyote.

THE STREETS OF THE
MOUNTAINS

THE STREETS OF THE
MOUNTAINS

ALL streets of the mountains lead to
the citadel; steep or slow they go
up to the core of the hills. Any trail that
goes otherwhere must dip and cross, sidle
and take chances. Rifts of the hills open
into each other, and the high meadows
are often wide enough to be called valleys
by courtesy; but one keeps this distinction
in mind, — valleys are the sunken places
of the earth, canons are scored out by
the glacier ploughs of God. They have a
better name in the Rockies for these hill-
fenced open glades of pleasantness ; they
call them parks. Here and there in the
hill country one comes upon blind gullies
fronted by high stony barriers. These
183

THE STREETS OF THE MOUNTAINS

head also for the heart of the mountains;
their distinction is that they never get any-
where.

All mountain streets have streams to
thread them, or deep grooves where a
stream might run. You would do well to
avoid that range uncomforted by singing
floods. You will find it forsaken of most
things but beauty and madness and death
and God. Many such lie east and north
away from the mid Sierras, and quicken
the imagination with the sense of pur-
poses not revealed, but the ordinary trav-
eler brings nothing away from them but
an intolerable thirst.

The river canons of the Sierras of the
Snows are better worth while than most
Broadways, though the choice of them is
like the choice of streets, not very well de-
termined by their names. There is always
184

THE STREETS OF THE MOUNTAINS

an amount of local history to be read in
the names of mountain highways where
one touches the successive waves of occu-
pation or discovery, as in the old villages
where the neighborhoods are not built
but grow. Here you have the Spanish
Californian in Cero Gordo and pinon ;
Symmes and Shepherd, pioneers both ;
Tunawai, probably Shoshone ; Oak Creek,
Kearsarge, — easy to fix the date of that
christening, — Tinpah, Paiute that; Mist
Canon and Paddy Jack's. The streets of
the west Sierras sloping toward the San
Joaquin are long and winding, but from
the east, my country, a day's ride carries
one to the lake regions. The next day
reaches the passes of the high divide, but
whether one gets passage depends a little
on how many have gone that road before,
and much on one's own powers. The
185

THE STREETS OF THE MOUNTAINS

passes are steep and windy ridges, though
not the highest. By two and three thou-
sand feet the snow-caps overtop them. It
is even possible to win through the Sierras
without having passed above timber-line,
but one misses a great exhilaration.

The shape of a new mountain is roughly
pyramidal, running out into long shark-
finned ridges that interfere and merge into
other thunder-splintered sierras. You get
the saw-tooth effect from a distance, but
the near-by granite bulk glitters with the
terrible keen polish of old glacial ages. I
say terrible ; so it seems. When those
glossy domes swim into the alpenglow,
wet after rain, you conceive how long and
imperturbable are the purposes of God.

Never believe what you are told, that
midsummer is the best time to go up the
streets of the mountain — well — perhaps
1 86

THE STREETS OF THE MOUNTAINS

for the merely idle or sportsmanly or sci-
entific; but for seeing and understanding,
the best time is when you have the longest
leave to stay. And here is a hint if you
would attempt the stateliest approaches ;
travel light, and as much as possible live
off the land. Mulligatawny soup and
tinned lobster will not bring you the favor
of the woodlanders.

Every canon commends itself for some
particular pleasantness ; this for pines, an-
other for trout, one for pure bleak beauty
of granite buttresses, one for its far-flung
irised falls ; and as I say, though some are
easier going, leads each to the cloud shoul-
dering citadel. First, near the canon mouth
you get the low-heading full-branched,
one-leaf pines. That is the sort of tree
to know at sight, for the globose, resin-
dripping cones have palatable, nourishing
187

THE STREETS OF THE MOUNTAINS

kernels, the main harvest of the Paiutes.
That perhaps accounts for their growing
accommodatingly below the limit of deep
snows, grouped sombrely on the valley-
ward slopes. The real procession of the
pines begins in the rifts with the long-
leafed Pinus Jeffrey i, sighing its soul away
upon the wind. And it ought not to sigh
in such good company. Here begins the
manzanita, adjusting its tortuous stiff stems
to the sharp waste of boulders, its pale olive
leaves twisting edgewise to the sleek, ruddy,
chestnut stems ; begins also the meadow-
sweet, burnished laurel, and the million
unregarded trumpets of the coral-red pent-
stemon. Wild life is likely to be busiest
about the lower pine borders. One looks
in hollow trees and hiving rocks for wild
honey. The drone of bees, the chatter of
jays, the hurry and stir of squirrels, is in-
188

THE STREETS OF THE MOUNTAINS

cessant ; the air is odorous and hot. The
roar of the stream fills up the morning
and evening intervals, and at night the
deer feed in the buckthorn thickets. It
is worth watching the year round in the
purlieus of the long-leafed pines. One
month or another you get sight or trail of
most roving mountain dwellers as they fol-
low the limit of forbidding snows, and more
bloom than you can properly appreciate.

Whatever goes up or comes down the
streets of the mountains, water has the
right of way; it takes the lowest ground
and the shortest passage. Where the
rifts are narrow, and some of the Sierra
canons are not a stone's throw from wall
to wall, the best trail for foot or horse
winds considerably above the watercourses ;
but in a country of cone-bearers there is
usually a good strip of swardy sod along
189

THE STREETS OF THE MOUNTAINS

the canon floor. Pine woods, the short-
leafed Balfour and Murryana of the high
Sierras, are sombre, rooted in the litter of
a thousand years, hushed, and corrective
to the spirit. The trail passes insensibly
into them from the black pines and a thin
belt of firs. You look back as you rise,
and strain for glimpses of the tawny val-
ley, blue glints of the Bitter Lake, and
tender cloud films on the farther ranges.
For such pictures the pine branches make
a noble frame. Presently they close in
wholly; they draw mysteriously near, cov-
ering your tracks, giving up the trail indif-
ferently, or with a secret grudge. You get
a kind of impatience with their locked
ranks, until you come out lastly on some
high, windy dome and see what they are
about. They troop thickly up the open
ways, river banks, and brook borders ; up
190

THE STREETS OF THE MOUNTAINS

open swales of dribbling springs; swarm
over old moraines ; circle the peaty swamps
and part and meet about clean still lakes ;
scale the stony gullies ; tormented, bowed,
persisting to the door of the storm cham-
bers, tall priests to pray for rain. The
spring winds lift clouds of pollen dust, finer
than frankincense, and trail it out over high
altars, staining the snow. No doubt they
understand this work better than we ; in
fact they know no other. " Come," say
the churches of the valleys, after a season
of dry years, " let us pray for rain." They
would do better to plant more trees.

It is a pity we have let the gift of lyric
improvisation die out. Sitting islanded on
some gray peak above the encompassing
wood, the soul is lifted up to sing the Iliad
of the pines. They have no voice but the
wind, and no sound of them rises up to the
191

THE STREETS OF THE MOUNTAINS

high places. But the waters, the evidences
of their power, that go down the steep and
stony ways, the outlets of ice-bordered
pools, the young rivers swaying with the
force of their running, they sing and shout
and trumpet at the falls, and the noise of it
far outreaches the forest spires. You see
from these conning towers how they call
and find each other in the slender gorges ;
how they fumble in the meadows, needing
the sheer nearing walls to give them coun-
tenance and show the way; and how the
pine woods are made glad by them.

Nothing else in the streets of the moun-
tains gives such a sense of pageantry as the
conifers ; other trees, if there are any, are
home dwellers, like the tender fluttered,
sisterhood of quaking asp. They grow in
clumps by spring borders, and all their
stems have a permanent curve toward the
192

THE STREETS OF THE MOUNTAINS

down slope, as you may also see in hill-
side pines, where they have borne the
weight of sagging drifts.

Well up from the valley, at the conflu-
ence of canons, are delectable summer
meadows. Fireweed flames about them
against the gray boulders ; streams are
open, go smoothly about the glacier slips
and make deep bluish pools .for trout.
Pines raise statelier shafts and give them-
selves room to grow, — gentians, shinleaf,
and little grass of Parnassus in their
golden checkered shadows ; the meadow is
white with violets and all outdoors keeps
the clock. For example, when the ripples
at the ford of the creek raise a clear half
tone, — sign that the snow water has come
down from the heated high ridges, — it is
time to light the evening fire. When it
drops off a note — but you will not know

THE STREETS OF THE MOUNTAINS

it except the Douglas squirrel tells you
with his high, fluty chirrup from the
pines' aerial gloom — sign that some star
watcher has caught the first far glint of
the nearing sun. Whitney cries it from
his vantage tower; it flashes from Oppa-
pago to the front of Williamson ; LeConte
speeds it to the westering peaks. The
high rills wake and run, the birds begin.
But down three thousand feet in the
canon, where you stir the fire under the
cooking pot, it will not be day for an hour.
It goes on, the play of light across the
high places, rosy, purpling, tender, glint
and glow, thunder and windy flood, like
the grave, exulting talk of elders above a
merry game.

Who shall say what another will find
most to his liking in the streets of the
mountains. As for me, once set above the
194

THE STREETS OF THE MOUNTAINS

country of the silver firs, I must go on
until I find white columbine. Around the
amphitheatres of the lake regions and above
them to the limit of perennial drifts they
gather flock-wise in splintered rock wastes.
The crowds of them, the airy spread of
sepals, the pale purity of the petal spurs,
the quivering swing of bloom, obsesses the
sense. One must learn to spare a little of
the pang of inexpressible beauty, not to
spend all one's purse in one shop. There
is always another year, and another.

Lingering on in the alpine regions until
the first full snow, which is often before
the cessation of bloom, one goes down in
good company. First snows are soft and
clogging and make laborious paths. Then
it is the roving inhabitants range down to
the edge of the wood, below the limit of
early storms. Early winter and early
195

THE STREETS OF THE MOUNTAINS

spring one may have sight or track of deer
and bear and bighorn, cougar and bobcat,
about the thickets of buckthorn on open
slopes between the black pines. But when
the ice crust is firm above the twenty foot
drifts, they range far and forage where
they will. Often in midwinter will come,
now and then, a long fall of soft snow pil-
ing three or four feet above the ice crust,
and work a real hardship for the dwellers
of these streets. When such a storm por-
tends the weather-wise black-tail will go
down across the valley and up to the pas-
tures of Waban where no more snow falls
than suffices to nourish the sparsely grow-
ing pines. But the bighorn, the wild
sheep, able to bear the bitterest storms
with no signs of stress, cannot cope with
the loose shifty snow. Never such a
storm goes over the mountains that the
196

THE STREETS OF THE MOUNTAINS

Indians do not catch them floundering
belly deep among the lower rifts. I have
a pair of horns, inconceivably heavy, that
were borne as late as a year ago by a very
monarch of the flock whom death over-
took at the mouth of Oak Creek after a
week of wet snow. He met it as a king
should, with no vain effort or trembling,
and it was wholly kind to take him so with
four of his following rather than that the
night prowlers should find him.

There is always more life abroad in the
winter hills than one looks to find, and
much more in evidence than in summer
weather. Light feet of hare that make no
print on the forest litter leave a wondrously
plain track in the snow. We used to look
and look at the beginning of winter for
the birds to come down from the pine
lands ; looked in the orchard and stubble ;
197

THE STREETS OF THE MOUNTAINS

looked north and south on the mesa for
their migratory passing, and wondered that
they never came. Busy little grosbeaks
picked about the kitchen doors, and wood-
peckers tapped the eves of the farm build-
ings, but we saw hardly any other of the
frequenters of the summer canons. After
a while when we grew bold to tempt the
snow borders we found them in the street
of the mountains. In the thick pine woods
where the overlapping boughs hung with
snow - wreaths make wind - proof shelter
tents, in a very community of dwelling,
winter the bird-folk who get their living
from the persisting cones and the larvae
harboring bark. Ground inhabiting spe-
cies seek the dim snow chambers of the
chaparral. Consider how it must be in a
hill-slope overgrown with stout - twigged,
partly evergreen shrubs, more than man
198

THE STREETS OF THE MOUNTAINS

high, and as thick as a hedge. Not all the
canon's sifting of snow can fill the intri-
cate spaces of the hill tangles. Here and
there an overhanging rock, or a stiff arch
of buckthorn, makes an opening to com-
municating rooms and runways deep under
the snow.

The light filtering through the snow walls
is blue and ghostly, but serves to show
seeds of shrubs and grass, and berries, and
the wind-built walls are warm against the
wind. It seems that live plants, especially
if they are evergreen and growing, give off
heat; the snow wall melts earliest from
within and hollows to thinness before there
is a hint of spring in the air. But you
think of these things afterward. Up in
the street it has the effect of being done
consciously ; the buckthorns lean to each
other and the drift to them, the little birds
199

THE STREETS OF THE MOUNTAINS

run in and out of their appointed ways
with the greatest cheerfulness. They give
almost no tokens of distress, and even if
the winter tries them too much you are
not to pity them. You of the house habit
can hardly understand the sense of the
hills. No doubt the labor of being com-
fortable gives you an exaggerated opinion
of yourself, an exaggerated pain to be set
aside. Whether the wild things under-
stand it or not they adapt themselves to its
processes with the greater ease. The busi-
ness that goes on in the street of the moun-
tain is tremendous, world-formative. Here
go birds, squirrels, and red deer, children
crying small wares and playing in the
street, but they do not obstruct its affairs.
Summer is their holiday ; " Come now,"
says the lord of the street, " I have need of
a great work and no more playing."
200

THE STREETS OF THE MOUNTAINS

But they are left borders and breathing-
space out of pure kindness. They are not
pushed out except by the exigencies of the
nobler plan which they accept with a dig-
nity the rest of us have not yet learned.

WATER BORDERS

WATER BORDERS

I LIKE that name the Indians give to
the mountain of Lone Pine, and find it
pertinent to my subject, — Oppapago, The
Weeper. It sits eastward and solitary from
the lordliest ranks of the Sierras, and above
a range of little, old, blunt hills, and has a
bowed, grave aspect as of some woman
you might have known, looking out across
the grassy barrows of her dead. From twin
gray lakes under its noble brow stream
down incessant white and tumbling waters.
" Mahala all time cry," said Winnenap',
drawing furrows in his rugged, wrinkled
cheeks.

The origin of mountain streams is like
the origin of tears, patent to the under-
standing but mysterious to the sense.
205

WATER BORDERS

They are always at it, but one so seldom
catches them in the act. Here in the val-
ley there is no cessation of waters even in
the season when the niggard frost gives
them scant leave to run. They make the
most of their midday hour, and tinkle all
night thinly under the ice. An ear laid to
the snow catches a muffled hint of their
eternal busyness fifteen or twenty feet
under the canon drifts, and long before
any appreciable spring thaw, the sagging
edges of the snow bridges mark out the
place of their running. One who ventures
to look for it finds the immediate source of
the spring freshets — all the hill fronts fur-
rowed with the reek of melting drifts, all
the gravelly flats in a swirl of waters. But
later, in June or July, when the camping
season begins, there runs the stream away
full and singing, with no visible reinforce-
206

WATER BORDERS

ment other than an icy trickle from some
high, belated clot of snow. Oftenest the
stream drops bodily from the bleak bowl
of some alpine lake ; sometimes breaks out
of a hillside as a spring where the ear can
trace it under the rubble of loose stones to
the neighborhood of some blind pool. But
that leaves the lakes to be accounted for.

The lake is the eye of the mountain, jade
green, placid, unwinking, also unfathom-
able. Whatever goes on under the high
and stony brows is guessed at. It is always
a favorite local tradition that one or an-
other of the blind lakes is bottomless. Of-
ten they lie in such deep cairns of broken
boulders that one never gets quite to them,
or gets away unhurt. One such drops be-
low the plunging slope that the Kearsarge
trail winds over, perilously, nearing the pass.
It lies still and wickedly green in its sharp-
207

WATER BORDERS

lipped cup, and the guides of that region
love to tell of the packs and pack animals
it has swallowed up.

But the lakes of Oppapago are perhaps
not so deep, less green than gray, and better
befriended. The ousel haunts them, while
still hang about their coasts the thin under-
cut drifts that never quite leave the high
altitudes. In and out of the bluish ice
caves he flits and sings, and his singing
heard from above is sweet and uncanny
like the Nixie's chord. One finds butter-
flies, too, about these high, sharp regions
which might be called desolate, but will not
by me who love them. This is above tim-
ber-line but not too high for comforting by
succulent small herbs and golden tufted
grass. A granite mountain does not
crumble with alacrity, but once resolved to
soil makes the best of it. Every handful
208

WATER BORDERS

of loose gravel not wholly water leached
affords a plant footing, and even in such
unpromising surroundings there is a choice
of locations. There is never going to be
any communism of mountain herbage, their
affinities are too sure. Full in the runnels
of snow water on gravelly, open spaces in
the shadow of a drift, one looks to find
buttercups, frozen knee-deep by night, and
owning no desire but to ripen their fruit
above the icy bath. Soppy little plants of
the portulaca and small, fine ferns shiver
under the drip of falls and in dribbling
crevices. The bleaker the situation, so it
is near a stream border, the better the cas-
siope loves it. Yet I have not found it
on the polished glacier slips, but where
the country rock cleaves and splinters in
the high windy headlands that the wild
sheep frequents, hordes and hordes of the
209

WATER BORDERS

white bells swing over matted, mossy foli-
age. On Oppapago, which is also called
Sheep Mountain, one finds not far from the
beds of cassiope the ice-worn, stony hollows
where the bighorns cradle their young.
These are above the wolf's quest and the
eagle's wont, and though the heather beds
are softer, they are neither so dry nor so
warm, and here only the stars go by. No
other animal of any pretensions makes a
habitat of the alpine regions. Now and
then one gets a hint of some small, brown
creature, rat or mouse kind, that slips
secretly among the rocks ; no others adapt
themselves to desertness of aridity or alti-
tude so readily as these ground inhabiting,
graminivorous species. If there is an open
stream the trout go up the lake as far as
the water breeds food for them, but the
ousel goes farthest, for pure love of it.
210

WATER BORDERS

Since no lake can be at the highest
point, it is possible to find plant life higher
than the water borders ; grasses perhaps
the highest, gilias, royal blue trusses of po-
lymonium, rosy plats of Sierra primroses.
What one has to get used to in flowers at
high altitudes is the bleaching of the sun.
Hardly do they hold their virgin color for
a day, and this early fading before their
function is performed gives them a pitiful
appearance not according with their hardi-
hood. The color scheme runs along the
high ridges from blue to rosy purple, car-
mine and coral red ; along the water borders
it is chiefly white and yellow where the
mimulus makes a vivid note, running into
red when the two schemes meet and mix
about the borders of the meadows, at the
upper limit of the columbine.

Here is the fashion in which a mountain

211

WATER BORDERS

stream gets down from the perennial pas-
tures of the snow to its proper level and
identity as an irrigating ditch. It slips
stilly by the glacier scoured rim of an ice
bordered pool, drops over sheer, broken
ledges to another pool, gathers itself,
plunges headlong on a rocky ripple slope,
finds a lake again, reinforced, roars down-
ward to a pot-hole, foams and bridles, glides
a tranquil reach in some still meadow,
tumbles into a sharp groove between hill
flanks, curdles under the stream tangles,
and so arrives at the open country and
steadier going. Meadows, little strips of
alpine freshness, begin before the timber-
line is reached. Here one treads on a
carpet of dwarf willows, downy catkins of
creditable size and the greatest economy
of foliage and stems. No other plant of
high altitudes knows its business so well.
212

WATER BORDERS

It hugs the ground, grows roots from stem
joints where no roots should be, grows a
slender leaf or two and twice as many erect
full catkins that rarely, even in that short
growing season, fail of fruit. Dipping over
banks in the inlets of the creeks, the fortu-
nate find the rosy apples of the miniature
manzanita, barely, but always quite suffi-
ciently, borne above the spongy sod. It
does not do to be anything but humble in
the alpine regions, but not fearful. I have
pawed about for hours in the chill sward
of meadows where one might properly ex-
pect to get one's death, and got no harm
from it, except it might be Oliver Twist's
complaint. One comes soon after this to
shrubby willows, and where willows are
trout may be confidently looked for in
most Sierra streams. There is no account-
ing for their distribution ; though provident
213

WATER BORDERS

anglers have assisted nature of late, one
still comes upon roaring brown waters
where trout might very well be, but are
not.

The highest limit of conifers — in the
middle Sierras, the white bark pine — is
not along the water border. They come
to it about the level of the heather, but
they have no such affinity for dampness as
the tamarack pines. Scarcely any bird-
note breaks the stillness of the timber-line,
but chipmunks inhabit here, as may be
guessed by the gnawed ruddy cones of the
pines, and lowering hours the woodchucks
come down to the water. On a little spit
of land running into Windy Lake we found
one summer the evidence of a tragedy ; a
pair of sheep's horns not fully grown caught
in the crotch of a pine where the living
sheep must have lodged them. The trunk
214

WATER BORDERS

of the tree had quite closed over them, and
the skull bones crumbled away from the
weathered horn cases. We hoped it was
not too far out of the running of night
prowlers to have put a speedy end to the
long agony, but we could not be sure. I
never liked the spit of Windy Lake again.
It seems that all snow nourished plants
count nothing so excellent in their kind as
to be forehanded with their bloom, work-
ing secretly to that end under the high
piled winters. The heathers begin by the
lake borders, while little sodden drifts still
shelter under their branches. I have seen
the tiniest of them (Kalmia glaucd) bloom-
ing, and with well-formed fruit, a foot away
from a snowbank from which it could
hardly have emerged within a week. Some-
how the soul of the heather has entered
into the blood of the English-speaking.
215

WATER BORDERS

"And oh! is that heather?" they say;
and the most indifferent ends by picking
a sprig of it in a hushed, wondering way.
One must suppose that the root of their
respective races issued from the glacial
borders at about the same epoch, and re-
member their origin.

Among the pines where the slope of the
land allows it, the streams run into smooth,
brown, trout-abounding rills across open
flats that are in reality filled lake basins.
These are the displaying grounds of the
gentians — blue — blue — eye - blue, per-
haps, virtuous and likable flowers. One is
not surprised to learn that they have tonic
properties. But if your meadow should be
outside the forest reserve, and the sheep
have been there, you will find little but the
shorter, paler G. Newberryii, and in the
matted sods of the little tongues of green-
216

WATER BORDERS

ness that lick up among the pines along
the watercourses, white, scentless, nearly
stemless, alpine violets.

At about the nine thousand foot level
and in the summer there will be hosts of
rosy-winged dodecatheon, called shooting-
stars, outlining the crystal runnels in the
sod. Single flowers have often a two-inch
spread of petal, and the full, twelve blos-
somed heads above the slender pedicels
have the airy effect of wings.

It is about this level one looks to find
the largest lakes with thick ranks of pines
bearing down on them, often swamped in
the summer floods and paying the inevita-
ble penalty for such encroachment. Here
in wet coves of the hills harbors that crowd
of bloom that makes the wonder of the Si-
erra canons.

They drift under the alternate flicker
217

WATER BORDERS

and gloom of the windy rooms of pines, in
gray rock shelters, and by the ooze of blind
springs, and their juxtapositions are the
best imaginable. Lilies come up out of
fern beds, columbine swings over meadow-
sweet, white rein-orchids quake in the lean-
ing grass. Open swales, where in wet years
may be running water, are plantations of
false hellebore ( Veratrum Califoruicum),
tall, branched candelabra of greenish bloom
above the sessile, sheathing, boat-shaped
leaves, semi - translucent in the sun. A
stately plant of the lily family, but why
"false?" It is frankly offensive in its
character, and its young juices deadly as
any hellebore that ever grew.

Like most mountain herbs it has an

uncanny haste to bloom. One hears by

night, when all the wood is still, the crepi-

tatious rustle of the unfolding leaves and

218

WATER BORDERS

the pushing flower-stalk within, that has
open blossoms before it has fairly un-
cramped from the sheath. It commends
itself by a certain exclusiveness of growth,
taking enough room and never elbowing;
for if the flora of the lake region has a fault
it is that there is too much of it. We have
more than three hundred species from
Kearsarge Canon alone, and if that does
not include them all it is because they were
already collected otherwhere.

One expects to find lakes down to about
nine thousand feet, leading into each other
by comparatively open ripple slopes and
white cascades. Below the lakes are filled
basins that are still spongy swamps, or
substantial meadows, as they get down and
down.

Here begin the stream tangles. On
the east slopes of the middle Sierras the
219

WATER BORDERS

pines, all but an occasional yellow variety,
desert the stream borders about the level
of the lowest lakes, and the birches and
tree-willows begin. The firs hold on al-
most to the mesa levels, — there are no
foothills on this eastern slope, — and who-
ever has firs misses nothing else. It goes
without saying that a tree that can afford
to take fifty years to its first fruiting will
repay acquaintance. It keeps, too, all that
half century, a virginal grace of outline,
but having once flowered, begins quietly
to put away the things of its youth. Year
by year the lower rounds of boughs are
shed, leaving no scar; year by year the
star-branched minarets approach the sky.
A fir-tree loves a water border, loves a long
wind in a draughty canon, loves to spend
itself secretly on the inner finishings of its
burnished, shapely cones. Broken open
220

WATER BORDERS

in mid-season the petal-shaped scales show
a crimson satin surface, perfect as a rose.

The birch — the brown -bark western
birch characteristic of lower stream tangles
— is a spoil sport. It grows thickly to
choke the stream that feeds it ; grudges it
the sky and space for angler's rod and fly.
The willows do better; painted-cup, cypri-
pedium, and the hollow stalks of span-broad
white umbels, find a footing among their
stems. But in general the steep plunges,
the white swirls, green and tawny pools,
the gliding hush of waters between the
meadows and the mesas afford little fish-
ing and few flowers.

One looks for these to begin again when
once free of the rifted canon walls ; the
high note of babble and laughter falls off
to the steadier mellow tone of a stream
that knows its purpose and reflects the sky.
221

OTHER WATER BORDERS

OTHER WATER BORDERS

IT is the proper destiny of every consid-
erable stream in the west to become an
irrigating ditch. It would seem the streams
are willing. They go as far as they can,
or dare, toward the tillable lands in their
own boulder fenced gullies — but how
much farther in the man-made waterways.
It is difficult to come into intimate relations
with appropriated waters ; like very busy
people they have no time to reveal them-
selves. One needs to have known an irri-
gating ditch when it was a brook, and to
have lived by it, to mark the morning and
evening tone of its crooning, rising and
falling to the excess of snow water ; to have
watched far across the valley, south to the
Eclipse and north to the Twisted Dyke,
225

OTHER WATER BORDERS

the shining wall of the village water gate ;
to see still blue herons stalking the little
glinting weirs across the field.

Perhaps to get into the mood of the
waterways one needs to have seen old
Amos Judson asquat on the headgate with
his gun, guarding his water-right toward
the end of a dry summer. Amos owned
the half of Tule Creek and the other half
pertained to the neighboring Greenfields
ranch. Years of a " short water crop," that
is, when too little snow fell on the high
pine ridges, or, falling, melted too early,
Amos held that it took all the water that
came down to make his half, and maintained
it with a Winchester and a deadly aim.
Jesus Montana, first proprietor of Green-
fields,— you can see at once that Judson
had the racial advantage, — contesting the
right with him, walked into five of Judson's
226

OTHER WATER BORDERS

bullets and his eternal possessions on the
same occasion. That was the Homeric
age of settlement and passed into tradition.
Twelve years later one of the Clarks, hold-
ing Greenfields, not so very green by now,
shot one of the Judsons. Perhaps he hoped
that also might become classic, but the jury
found for manslaughter. It had the effect
of discouraging the Greenfields claim, but
Amos used to sit on the headgate just the
same, as quaint and lone a figure as the
sandhill crane watching for water toads
below the Tule drop. Every subsequent
owner of Greenfields bought it with Amos
in full view. The last of these was Die-
drick. Along in August of that year came
a week of low water. Judson's ditch failed
and he went out with his rifle to learn why.
There on the headgate sat Diedrick's frau
with a long-handled shovel across her lap
227

OTHER WATER BORDERS

and all the water turned into Diedrick's
ditch ; there she sat knitting through the
long sun, and the children brought out her
dinner. It was all up with Amos ; he was
too much of a gentleman to fight a lady —
that was the way he expressed it. She was
a very large lady, and a long-handled shovel
is no mean weapon. The next year Judson
and Diedrick put in a modern water gauge
and took the summer ebb in equal inches.
Some of the water-right difficulties are
more squalid than this, some more tragic ;
but unless you have known them you can-
not very well know what the water thinks
as it slips past' the gardens and in the long
slow sweeps of the canal. You get that
sense of brooding from the confined and
sober floods, not all at once but by de-
grees, as one might become aware of a mid-
dle-aged and serious neighbor who has had
228

OTHER WATER BORDERS

that in his life to make him so. It is the
repose of the completely accepted instinct.
With the water runs a certain following
of thirsty herbs and shrubs. The willows
go as far as the stream goes, and a bit far-
ther on the slightest provocation. They
will strike root in the leak of a flume, or
the dribble of an overfull bank, coaxing
the water beyond its appointed bounds.
Given a new waterway in a barren land,
and in three years the willows have fringed
all its miles of banks ; three years more and
they will touch tops across it. It is perhaps
due to the early usurpation of the willows
that so little else finds growing-room along
the large canals. The birch beginning far
back in the canon tangles is more conser-
vative ; it is shy of man haunts and needs
to have the permanence of its drink assured.
It stops far short of the summer limit of
229

OTHER WATER BORDERS

waters, and I have never known it to take
up a position on the banks beyond the
ploughed lands. There is something almost
like premeditation in the avoidance of cul-
tivated tracts by certain plants of water
borders. The clematis, mingling its foliage'
secretly with its host, comes down with the
stream tangles to the village fences, skips
over to corners of little used pasture lands
and the plantations that spring up about
waste water pools ; but never ventures a
footing in the trail of spade or plough ; will
not be persuaded to grow in any garden
plot. On the other hand, the horehound,
the common European species imported
with the colonies, hankers after hedgerows
and snug little borders. It is more widely
distributed than many native species, and
may be always found along the ditches in
the village corners, where it is not appre-
230

OTHER WATER BORDERS

ciated. The irrigating ditch is an impartial
distributer. It gathers all the alien weeds
that come west in garden and grass seeds
and affords them harbor in its banks.
There one finds the European mallow
(Malva rotundifolid) spreading out to the
streets with the summer overflow, and every
spring a dandelion or two, brought in with
the blue grass seed, uncurls in the swardy
soil. Farther than either of these have
come the lilies that the Chinese coolies
cultivate in adjacent mud holes for their
foodful bulbs. The seegoo establishes it-
self very readily in swampy borders, and
the white blossom spikes among the arrow-
pointed leaves are quite as acceptable to
the eye as any native species.

In the neighborhood of towns founded
by the Spanish Calif ornians, whether this
plant is native to the locality or not, one can
231

OTHER WATER BORDERS

always find aromatic clumps oiyerba buena,
the " good herb " (Micromeria Douglas sii).
The virtue of it as a febrifuge was taught
to the mission fathers by the neophytes,
and wise old dames of my acquaintance have
worked astonishing cures with it and the
succulent yerba mansa. This last is native
to wet meadows and distinguished enough
to have a family all to itself.

Where the irrigating ditches are shallow
and a little neglected, they choke quickly
with watercress that multiplies about the
lowest Sierra springs. It is characteristic
of the frequenters of water borders near
man haunts, that they are chiefly of the
sorts that are useful to man, as if they made
their services an excuse for the intrusion.
The joint-grass of soggy pastures produces
edible, nut-flavored tubers, called by the
Indians taboose. The common reed of the
232

OTHER WATER BORDERS

ultramontane marshes (here Phragmites
vulgaris\ a very stately, whispering reed,
light and strong for shafts or arrows, affords
sweet sap and pith which makes a passable
sugar.

It seems the secrets of plant powers and
influences yield themselves most readily to
primitive peoples, at least one never hears
of the knowledge coming from any other
source. The Indian never concerns him-
self, as the botanist and the poet, with the
plant's appearances and relations, but with
what it can do for him. It can do much,
but how do you suppose he finds it out ;
what instincts or accidents guide him ?
How does a cat know when to eat catnip ?
Why do western bred cattle avoid loco
weed, and strangers eat it and go mad?
One might suppose that in a time of famine
the Paiutes digged wild parsnip in meadow
233

OTHER WATER BORDERS

corners and died from eating it, and so
learned to produce death swiftly and at
will. But how did they learn, repenting
in the last agony, that animal fat is the best
antidote for its virulence ; and who taught
them that the essence of joint pine (Ephe-
dra nevadensis), which looks to have no
juice in it of any sort, is efficacious in
stomachic disorders. But they so under-
stand and so use. One believes it to be a
sort of instinct atrophied by disuse in a
complexer civilization. I remember very
well when I came first upon a wet meadow
of yerba mansa, not knowing its name or
use. It looked potent ; the cool, shiny
leaves, the succulent, pink stems and fruity
bloom. A little touch, a hint, a word, and
I should have known what use to put them
to. So I felt, unwilling to leave it until we
had come to an understanding. So a mu-
234

OTHER WATER BORDERS

sician might have felt in the presence of
an instrument known to be within his pro-
vince, but beyond his power. It was with
the relieved sense of having shaped a long
surmise that I watched the Senora Ro-
mero make a poultice of it for my burned
hand.

On, down from the lower lakes to the
village weirs, the brown and golden disks of
helenum have beauty as a sufficient excuse
for being. The plants anchor out on tiny
capes, or mid-stream islets, with the nearly
sessile radicle leaves submerged. The
flowers keep up a constant trepidation in
time with the hasty water beating at their
stems, a quivering, instinct with life, that
seems always at the point of breaking into
flight ; just as the babble of the water-
courses always approaches articulation but
never quite achieves it. Although of wide
235

OTHER WATER BORDERS

range the helenum never makes itself com-
mon through profusion, and may be looked
for in the same places from year to year.
Another lake dweller that comes down to
the ploughed lands is the red columbine (C.
truncatd). It requires no encouragement
other than shade, but grows too rank in the
summer heats and loses its wildwood grace.
A common enough orchid in these parts is
the false lady's slipper (Epipactis giganted],
one that springs up by any water where
there is sufficient growth of other sorts to
give it countenance. It seems to thrive
best in an atmosphere of suffocation.

The middle Sierras fall off abruptly east-
ward toward the high valleys. Peaks of
the fourteen thousand class, belted with
sombre swathes of pine, rise almost direct-
ly from the bench lands with no foothill
approaches. At the lower edge of the
236

OTHER WATER BORDERS

bench or mesa the land falls away, often
by a fault, to the river hollows, and along
the drop one looks for springs or intermit-
tent swampy swales. Here the plant world
resembles a little the lake gardens, modified
by altitude and the use the town folk put
it to for pasture. Here are cress, blue
violets, potentilla, and, in the damp of the
willow fence-rows, white false asphodels.
I am sure we make too free use of this word
false in naming plants — false mallow, false
lupine, and the like. The asphodel is at
least no falsifier, but a true lily by all the
heaven-set marks, though small of flower
and run mostly to leaves, and should have
a name that gives it credit for growing up
in such celestial semblance. Native to the
mesa meadows is a pale iris, gardens of it
acres wide, that in the spring season of full
bloom make an airy fluttering as of azure
237

OTHER WATER BORDERS

wings. Single flowers are too thin and
sketchy of outline to affect the imagination,
but the full fields have the misty blue of
mirage waters rolled across desert sand,
and quicken the senses to the anticipation
of things ethereal. A very poet's flower, I
thought; not fit for gathering up, and
proving a nuisance in the pastures, there-
fore needing to be the more loved. And
one day I caught Winnenap' drawing out
from mid leaf a fine strong fibre for making
snares. The borders of the iris fields are
pure gold, nearly sessile buttercups and a
creeping-stemmed composite of a redder
hue. I am convinced that English-speak-
ing children will always have buttercups.
If they do not light upon the original com-
panion of little frogs they will take the next
best and cherish it accordingly. I find five
unrelated species loved by that name, and
238

OTHER WATER BORDERS

as many more and as inappropriately called
cowslips.

By every mesa spring one may expect to
find a single shrub of the buckthorn, called
of old time Cascara sagrada — the sacred
bark. Up in the canons, within the limit
of the rains, it seeks rather a stony slope,
but in the dry valleys is not found away
from water borders.

In all the valleys and along the desert
edges of the west are considerable areas of
soil sickly with alkali-collecting pools, black
and evil-smelling like old blood. Very little
grows hereabout but thick-leaved pickle
weed. Curiously enough, in this stiff mud,
along roadways where there is frequently
a little leakage from canals, grows the only
western representative of the true helio-
tropes (Heliotropium curassavicum). It has
flowers of faded white, foliage of faded
239

OTHER WATER BORDERS

green, resembling the " live-for-ever " of old
gardens and graveyards, but even less at-
tractive. After so much schooling in the
virtues of water-seeking plants, one is not
surprised to learn that its mucilaginous sap
has healing powers.

Last and inevitable resort of overflow
waters is the tulares, great wastes of reeds
(Juncus} in sickly, slow streams. The
reeds, called tules, are ghostly pale in
winter, in summer deep poisonous-looking
green, the waters thick and brown; the
reed beds breaking into dingy pools, clumps
of rotting willows, narrow winding water
lanes and sinking paths. The tules grow
inconceivably thick in places, standing man-
high above the water; cattle, no, not any
fish nor fowl can penetrate them. Old
stalks succumb slowly ; the bed soil is quag-
mire, settling with the weight as it fills
240

OTHER WATER BORDERS

and fills. Too slowly for counting they
raise little islands from the bog and reclaim
the land. The waters pushed out cut
deeper channels, gnaw off the edges of the
solid earth.

The tulares are full of mystery and ma-
laria. That is why we have meant to
explore them and have never done so. It
must be a happy mystery. So you would
think to hear the redwinged blackbirds
proclaim it clear March mornings. Flocks
of them, and every flock a myriad, shelter
in the dry, whispering stems. They make
little arched runways deep into the heart
of the tule beds. Miles across the valley
one hears the clamor of their high, keen
flutings in the mating weather.

Wild fowl, quacking hordes of them, nest
in the tulares. Any day's venture will
raise from open shallows the great blue
241

OTHER WATER BORDERS

heron on his hollow wings. Chill evenings
the mallard drakes cry continually from the
glassy pools, the bittern's hollow boom rolls
along the water paths. Strange and far-
flown fowl drop down against the saffron,
autumn sky. All day wings beat above it
hazy with speed ; long flights of cranes
glimmer in the twilight. By night one
wakes to hear the clanging geese go over.
One wishes for, but gets no nearer speech
from those the reedy fens have swallowed
up. What they do there, how fare, what
find, is the secret of the tulares.

NURSLINGS OF THE SKY

NURSLINGS OF THE SKY

CHOOSE a hill country for storms.
There all the business of the weather
is carried on above your horizon and loses
its terror in familiarity. When you come
to think about it, the disastrous storms are
on the levels, sea or sand or plains. There
you get only a hint of what is about to hap-
pen, the fume of the gods rising from their
meeting place under the rim of the world ;
and when it breaks upon you there is no
stay nor shelter. The terrible mewings
and mouthings of a Kansas wind have the
added terror of viewlessness. You are
lapped in them like uprooted grass ; sus-
pect them of a personal grudge. But the
storms of hill countries have other busi-
ness. They scoop watercourses, manure
245

NURSLINGS OF THE SKY

the pines, twist them to a finer fibre, fit the
firs to be masts and spars, and, if you keep
reasonably out of the track of their affairs,
do you no harm.

They have habits to be learned, appointed
paths, seasons, and warnings, and they leave
you in no doubt about their performances.
One who builds his house on a water scar
or the rubble of a steep slope must take
chances. So they did in Overtown who
built in the wash of Argus water, and at
Kearsarge at the foot of a steep, treeless
swale. After twenty years Argus water rose
in the wash against the frail houses, and
the piled snows of Kearsarge slid down
at a thunder peal over the cabins and the
camp, but you could conceive that it was
the fault of neither the water nor the snow.

The first effect of cloud study is a sense
of presence and intention in storm pro-
246

NURSLINGS OF THE SKY

cesses. Weather does not happen. It is
the visible manifestation of the Spirit mov-
ing itself in the void. It gathers itself to-
gether under the heavens ; rains, snows,
yearns mightily in wind, smiles; and the
Weather Bureau, situated advantageously
for that very business, taps the record on
his instruments and going out on the
streets denies his God, not having gathered
the sense of what he has seen. Hardly
anybody takes account of the fact that
John Muir, who knows more of mountain
storms than any other, is a devout man.

Of the high Sierras choose the neigh-
borhood of the splintered peaks about the
Kern and King's river divide for storm
study, or the short, wide-mouthed canons
opening eastward on high valleys. Days
when the hollows are steeped in a warm,
winey flood the clouds come walking on
247

NURSLINGS OF THE SKY

the floor of heaven, flat and pearly gray
beneath, rounded and pearly white above.
They gather flock-wise, moving on the level
currents that roll about the peaks, lock
hands and settle with the cooler air, draw-
ing a veil about those places where they do
their work. If their meeting or parting
takes place at sunrise or sunset, as it often
does, one gets the splendor of the apoca-
lypse. There will be cloud pillars miles
high, snow-capped, glorified, and preserv-
ing an orderly perspective before the un-
barred door of the sun, or perhaps mere
ghosts of clouds that dance to some pied
piper of an unfelt wind. But be it day or
night, once they have settled to their work,
one sees from the valley only the blank
wall of their tents stretched along the
ranges. To get the real effect of a moun-
tain storm you must be inside.
248

NURSLINGS OF THE SKY

One who goes often into a hill country
learns not to say : What if it should rain ?
It always does rain somewhere among the
peaks: the unusual thing is that one should
escape it. You might suppose that if you
took any account of plant contrivances to
save their pollen powder against showers.
Note how many there are deep-throated
and bell-flowered like the pentstemons, how
many have nodding pedicels as the colum-
bine, how many grow in copse shelters and
grow there only. There is keen delight in
the quick showers of summer canons, with
the added comfort, born of experience, of
knowing that no harm comes of a wetting
at high altitudes. The day is warm ; a
white cloud spies over the canon wall, slips
up behind the ridge to cross it by some
windy pass, obscures your sun. Next you
hear the rain drum on the broad-leaved
249

NURSLINGS OF THE SKY

hellebore, and beat down the mimulus be-
side the brook. You shelter on the lee of
some strong pine with shut-winged butter-
flies and merry, fiddling creatures of the
wood. Runnels of rain water from the
glacier-slips swirl through the pine needles
into rivulets ; the streams froth and rise in
their banks. The sky is white with cloud ;
the sky is gray with rain ; the sky is clear.
The summer showers leave no wake.

Such as these follow each other day by
day for weeks in August weather. Some-
times they chill suddenly into wet snow
that packs about the lake gardens clear to
the blossom frills, and melts away harm-
lessly. Sometimes one has the good for-
tune from a heather -grown headland to
watch a rain -cloud forming in mid-air.
Out over meadow or lake region begins a
little darkling of the sky, — no cloud, no
250

NURSLINGS OF THE SKY

wind, just a smokiness such as spirits ma-
terialize from in witch stories.

It rays out and draws to it some floating
films from secret canons. Rain begins,
"slow dropping veil of thinnest lawn;" a
wind comes up and drives the formless
thing across a meadow, or a dull lake pit-
ted by the glancing drops, dissolving as it
drives. Such rains relieve like tears.

The same season brings the rains that
have work to do, ploughing storms that
alter the face of things. These come with
thunder and the play of live fire along the
rocks. They come with great winds that
try the pines for their work upon the seas
and strike out the unfit. They shake
down avalanches of splinters from sky-line
pinnacles and raise up sudden floods like
battle fronts in the canons against towns,
trees, and boulders. They would be kind
251

NURSLINGS OF THE SKY

if they could, but have more important
matters. Such storms, called cloud-bursts
by the country folk, are not rain, rather
the spillings of Thor's cup, jarred by the
Thunderer. After such a one the water
that comes up in the village hydrants miles
away is white with forced bubbles from the
wind-tormented streams.

All that storms do to the face of the
earth you may read in the geographies, but
not what they do to our contemporaries.
I remember one night of thunderous rain
made unendurably mournful by the house-
less cry of a cougar whose lair, and perhaps
his family, had been buried under a slide of
broken boulders on the slope of Kearsarge.
We had heard the heavy denotation of
the slide about the hour of the alpenglow,
a pale rosy interval in a darkling air, and
judged he must have come from hunting
252

NURSLINGS OF THE SKY

to the ruined cliff and paced the night out
before it, crying a very human woe. I re-
member, too, in that same season of storms,
a lake made milky white for days, and
crowded out of its bed by clay washed into
it by a fury of rain, with the trout floating
in it belly up, stunned by the shock of the
sudden flood. But there were trout enough
for what was left of the lake next year and
the beginning of a meadow about its upper
rim. What taxed me most in the wreck
of one of my favorite canons by cloud-
burst was to see a bobcat mother mouth-
ing her drowned kittens in the ruined lair
built in the wash, far above the limit of ac-
customed waters, but not far enough for
the unexpected. After a time you get the
point of view of gods about these things to
save you from being too pitiful.

The great snows that come at the be-
253

NURSLINGS OF THE SKY

ginning of winter, before there is yet any
snow except the perpetual high banks, are
best worth while to watch. These come
often before the late bloomers are gone
and while the migratory birds are still in
the piney woods. Down in the valley you
see little but the flocking of blackbirds in
the streets, or the low flight of mallards
over the tulares, and the gathering of
clouds behind Williamson. First there is
a waiting stillness in the wood; the pine-
trees creak although there is no wind, the
sky glowers, the firs rock by the water
borders. The noise of the creek rises in-
sistently and falls off a full note like a child
abashed by sudden silence in the room.
This changing of the stream-tone following
tardily the changes of the sun on melting
snows is most meaningful of wood notes.
After it runs a little trumpeter wind to cry
254

NURSLINGS OF THE SKY

the wild creatures to their holes. Some-
times the warning hangs in the air for days
with increasing stillness. Only Clark's
crow and the strident jays make light of it ;
only they can afford to. The cattle get
down to the foothills and ground inhabit-
ing creatures make fast their doors. It
grows chill, blind clouds fumble in the
canons; there will be a roll of thunder,
perhaps, or a flurry of rain, but mostly the
snow is born in the air with quietness and
the sense of strong white pinions softly
stirred. It increases, is wet and clogging,
and makes a white night of midday.

There is seldom any wind with first
snows, more often rain, but later, when
there is already a smooth foot or two over
all the slopes, the drifts begin. The late
snows are fine and dry, mere ice granules
at the wind's will. Keen mornings after
255

NURSLINGS OF THE SKY

a storm they are blown out in wreaths and
banners from the high ridges sifting into
the canons.

Once in a year or so we have a " big
snow." The cloud tents are widened out
to shut in the valley and an outlying range
or two and are drawn tight against the sun.
Such a storm begins warm, with a dry white
mist that fills and fills between the ridges,
and the air is thick with formless groaning.
Now for days you get no hint of the neigh-
boring ranges until the snows begin to
lighten and some shouldering peak lifts
through a rent. Mornings after the heavy
snows are steely blue, two-edged with cold,
divinely fresh and still, and these are times
to go up to the pine borders. There you
may find floundering in the unstable drifts
" tainted wethers " of the wild sheep, faint
from age and hunger ; easy prey. Even the
256

NURSLINGS OF THE SKY

deer make slow going in the thick fresh
snow, and once we found a wolverine going
blind and feebly in the white glare.

No tree takes the snow stress with such
ease as the silver fir. The star-whorled,
fan-spread branches droop under the soft
wreaths — droop and press flatly to the
trunk; presently the point of overloading
is reached, there is a soft sough and muf- -

°

fled dropping, the boughs recover, and the -^j
weighting goes on until the drifts have I
reached the midmost whorls and covered I
up the branches. When the snows are ?
particularly wet and heavy they spread
over the young firs in green-ribbed tents
wherein harbor winter loving birds.

All storms of desert hills, except wind

storms, are impotent. East and east of the

Sierras they rise in nearly parallel ranges,

desertward, and no rain breaks over them,

257

NURSLINGS OF THE SKY

except from some far -strayed cloud or
roving wind from the California Gulf, and
these only in winter. In summer the sky
travails with thunderings and the flare of
sheet lightnings to win a few blistering big
drops, and once in a lifetime the chance of
a torrent. But you have not known what
force resides in the mindless things until
you have known a desert wind. One
expects it at the turn of the two seasons,
wet and dry, with electrified tense nerves.
Along the edge of the mesa where it drops
off to the valley, dust devils begin to rise
white and steady, fanning out at the top
like the genii out of the Fisherman's bot-
tle. One supposes the Indians might have
learned the use of smoke signals from
these dust pillars as they learn most things
direct from the tutelage of the earth. The
air begins to move fluently, blowing hot
258

NURSLINGS OF THE SKY

and cold between the ranges. Far south
rises a murk of sand against the sky; it
grows, the wind shakes itself, and has a
smell of earth. The cloud of small dust
takes on the color of gold and shuts out
the neighborhood, the push of the wind is
unsparing. Only man of all folk is fool-
ish enough to stir abroad in it. But being
in a house is really much worse ; no relief
from the dust, and a great fear of the
creaking timbers. There is no looking
ahead in such a wind, and the bite of the
small sharp sand on exposed skin is keener
than any insect sting. One might sleep,
for the lapping of the wind wears one to
the point of exhaustion very soon, but
there is dread, in open sand stretches some-
times justified, of being over blown by the
drift. It is hot, dry, fretful work, but by
going along the ground with the wind
259

NURSLINGS OF THE SKY

behind, one may come upon strange things
in its tumultuous privacy. I like these
truces of wind and heat that the desert
makes, otherwise I do not know how I
should come by so many acquaintances
with furtive folk. I like to see hawks sit-
ting daunted in shallow holes, not daring
to spread a feather, and doves in a row by
the prickle bushes, and shut-eyed cattle,
turned tail to the wind in a patient doze.
I like the smother of sand among the
dunes, and finding small coiled snakes in
open places, but I never like to come in a
wind upon the silly sheep. The wind robs
them of what wit they had, and they seem
never to have learned the self-induced hyp-
notic stupor with which most wild things
endure weather stress. I have never heard
that the desert winds brought harm to any
other than the wandering shepherds and
260

NURSLINGS OF THE SKY

their flocks. Once below Pastaria Little
Pete showed me bones sticking out of the
sand where a flock of two hundred had
been smothered in a bygone wind. In
many places the four-foot posts of a cattle
fence had been buried by the wind-blown
dunes.

It is enough occupation, when no storm
is brewing, to watch the cloud currents and
the chambers of the sky. From Kearsarge,
say, you look over Inyo and find pink soft
cloud masses asleep on the level desert air;
south of you hurries a white troop late to
some gathering of their kind at the back
of Oppapago ; nosing the foot of Waban,
a woolly mist creeps south. In the clean,
smooth paths of the middle sky and highest
up in air, drift, unshepherded, small flocks
ranging contrarily. You will find the
proper names of these things in the reports
261

NURSLINGS OF THE SKY

of the Weather Bureau — cirrus, cumulus,
and the like — and charts that will teach by
study when to sow and take up crops. It is
astonishing the trouble men will be at to
find out when to plant potatoes, and gloze
over the eternal meaning of the skies.
You have to beat out for yourself many
mornings on the windly headlands the
sense of the fact that you get the same
rainbow in the cloud drift over Waban and
the spray of your garden hose. And not
necessarily then do you live up to it.

THE LITTLE TOWN OF THE
GRAPE VINES

THE LITTLE TOWN OF THE
GRAPE VINES

THERE are still some places in the
west where the quails cry " cuidado"\
where all the speech is soft, all the man-
ners gentle ; where all the dishes have
chile in them, and they make more of the
Sixteenth of September than they do of
the Fourth of July. I mean in particular
El Pueblo de Las Uvas. Where it lies,
how to come at it, you will not get from
me; rather would I show you the heron's
nest in the tulares. It has a peak behind
it, glinting above the tamarack pines, above
a breaker of ruddy hills that have a long
slope valley-wards and the shoreward steep
of waves toward the Sierras.

Below the Town of the Grape Vines,
265

THE LITTLE TOWN OF THE GRAPE VINES

which shortens to Las Uvas for common
use, the land dips away to the river pas-
tures and the tulares. It shrouds under
a twilight thicket of vines, under a dome of
cottonwood-trees, drowsy and murmurous
as a hive. Hereabouts are some strips of
tillage and the headgates that dam up the
creek for the village weirs ; upstream you
catch the growl of the arrastra. Wild vines
that begin among the willows lap over to
the orchard rows, take the trellis and roof-
tree.

There is another town above Las Uvas
that merits some attention, a town of arches
and airy crofts, full of linnets, blackbirds,
fruit birds, small sharp hawks, and mock-
ingbirds that sing by night. They pour
out piercing, unendurably sweet cavatinas
above the fragrance of bloom and musky
smell of fruit. Singing is in fact the busi-
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ness of the night at Las Uvas as sleeping
is for midday. When the moon comes
over the mountain wall new-washed from
the sea, and the shadows lie like lace on
the stamped floors of the patios, from recess
to recess of the vine tangle runs the thrum
of guitars and the voice of singing.

At Las Uvas they keep up all the good
customs brought out of Old Mexico or
bred in a lotus-eating land ; drink, and are
merry and look out for something to eat
afterward ; have children, nine or ten to a
family, have cock-fights, keep the siesta,
smoke cigarettes and wait for the sun to
go down. And always they dance ; at dusk
on the smooth adobe floors, afternoons
under the trellises where the earth is damp
and has a fruity smell. A betrothal, a
wedding, or a christening, or the mere
proximity of a guitar is sufficient occasion;
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THE LITTLE TOWN OF THE GRAPE VINES

and if J:he occasion lacks, send for the
guitar and dance anyway.

All this requires explanation. Antonio
Sevadra, drifting this way from Old Mexico
with the flood that poured into the Tappan
district after the first notable strike, dis-
covered La Golondrina. It was a gener-
ous lode and Tony a good fellow ; to work
it he brought in all the Sevadras, even to
the twice-removed ; all the Castros who
were his wife's family, all the Saises, Ro-
meros, and Eschobars, — the relations of
his relations-in-law. There you have the
beginning of a pretty considerable town.
To these accrued much of the Spanish
California float swept out of the southwest
by eastern enterprise. They slacked away
again when the price of silver went down,
and the ore dwindled in La Golondrina.
All the hot eddy of mining life swept away
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THE LITTLE TOWN OF THE GRAPE VINES

from that corner of the hills, but there
were always those too idle, too poor to
move, or too easily content with El Pueblo
de Las Uvas.

Nobody comes nowadays to the town of
the grape vines except, as we say, " with
the breath of crying," but of these enough.
All the low sills run over with small heads.
Ah, ah ! There is a kind of pride in that
if you did but know it, to have your baby
every year or so as the time sets, and keep
a full breast. So great a blessing as mar-
riage is easily come by. It is told of Ruy
Garcia that when he went for his marriage
license he lacked a dollar of the clerk's
fee, but borrowed it of the sheriff, who ex-
pected reelection and exhibited thereby a
commendable thrift.

Of what account is it to lack meal or
meat when you may have it of any neigh-
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THE LITTLE TOWN OF THE GRAPE VINES

bor? Besides, there is sometimes a point
of honor in these things. Jesus Romero,
father of ten, had a job sacking ore in the
Marionette which he gave up of his own
accord. " Eh, why ? " said Jesus, " for my
fam'ly."

" It is so, senora," he said solemnly, " I
go to the Marionette, I work, I eat meat —
pie — frijoles — good, ver' good. I come
home sad'day nigh' I see my fam'ly. I play
HI' game poker with the boys, have HI' drink
wine, my money all gone. My family have
no money, nothing eat. All time I work at
mine I eat, good, ver' good grub. I think
sorry for my fam'ly. No, no, senora, I no
work no more that Marionette, I stay with
my fam'ly." The wonder of it is, I think,
that the family had the same point of view.

Every house in the town of the vines has
its garden plot, corn and brown beans and
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THE LITTLE TOWN OF THE GRAPE VINES

a row of peppers reddening in the sun ; and
in damp borders of the irrigating ditches
clumps of yerba santa, horehound, catnip,
and spikenard, wholesome herbs and cura-
tive, but if no peppers then nothing at all.
You will have for a holiday dinner, in Las
Uvas, soup with meat balls and chile in it,
chicken with chile, rice with chile, fried
beans with more chile, enchilada, which is
corn cake with a sauce of chile and to-
matoes, onion, grated cheese, and olives,
and for a relish chile tepines passed about
in a dish, all of which is comfortable and
corrective to the stomach. You will have
wine which every man makes for himself,
of good body and inimitable bouquet, and
sweets that are not nearly so nice as they
look.

There are two occasions when you may
count on that kind of a meal ; always on
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THE LITTLE TOWN OF THE GRAPE VINES

the Sixteenth of September, and on the
two-yearly visits of Father Shannon. It
is absurd, of course, that El Pueblo de
Las Uvas should have an Irish priest, but
Black Rock, Minton, Jimville, and all that
country round do not find it so. Father
Shannon visits them all, waits by the Red
Butte to confess the shepherds who go
through with their flocks, carries blessing
to small and isolated mines, and so in the
course of a year or so works around to
Las Uvas to bury and marry and christen.
Then all the little graves in the Campo
Santo are brave with tapers, the brown pine
headboards blossom like Aaron's rod with
paper roses and bright cheap prints of
Our Lady of Sorrows. Then the Senora
Sevadra, who thinks herself elect of heaven
for that office, gathers up the original sin-
ners, the little Elijias, Lolas, Manuelitas,
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THE LITTLE TOWN OF THE GRAPE VINES

Joses, and Felipes, by dint of adjurations
and sweets smuggled into small perspiring
palms, to fit them for the Sacrament.

I used to peek in at them, never so softly,
in Dona Ina's living-room ; Raphael-eyed
little imps, going sidewise on their knees
to rest them from the bare floor, candles
lit on the mantel to give a religious air,
and a great sheaf of wild bloom before the
Holy Family. Come Sunday they set out
the altar in the schoolhouse, with the fine-
drawn altar cloths, the beaten silver candle-
sticks, and the wax images, chief glory of
Las Uvas, brought up mule-back from Old
Mexico forty years ago. All in white the
communicants go up two and two in a
hushed, sweet awe to take the body of their
Lord, and Tomaso, who is priest's boy, tries
not to look unduly puffed up by his office.
After that you have dinner and a bottle of
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THE LITTLE TOWN OF THE GRAPE VINES

wine that ripened on the sunny slope of
Escondito. All the week Father Shannon
has shriven his people, who bring clean
conscience to the betterment of appetite,
and the Father sets them an example.
Father Shannon is rather big about the
middle to accommodate the large laugh that
lives in him, but a most shrewd searcher
of hearts. It is reported that one derives
comfort from his confessional, and I for
my part believe it.

The celebration of the Sixteenth, though
it comes every year, takes as long to pre-
pare for as Holy Communion. The senor-
itas have each a new dress apiece, the
senoras a new rebosa. The young gentle-
men have new silver trimmings to their
sombreros, unspeakable ties, silk handker-
chiefs, and new leathers to their spurs. At
this time when the peppers glow in the
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THE LITTLE TOWN OF THE GRAPE VINES

gardens and the young quail cry " cuidado?
" have a care ! " you can hear the plump,
plump of the metate from the alcoves of the
vines where comfortable old dames, whose
experience gives them the touch of art, are
pounding out corn for tamales.

School-teachers from abroad have tried
before now at Las Uvas to have school
begin on the first of September, but got
nothing else to stir in the heads of the little
Castros, Garcias, and Romeros but feasts
and cock-fights until after the Sixteenth.
Perhaps you need to be told that this is
the anniversary of the Republic, when
liberty awoke and cried in the provinces
of Old Mexico. You are aroused at mid-
night to hear them shouting in the streets,
"Vive la Libertad!" answered from the
houses and the recesses of the vines, " Vive
la Mexico!" At sunrise shots are fired
275

THE LITTLE TOWN OF THE GRAPE VINES

commemorating the tragedy of unhappy
Maximilian, and then music, the noblest of
national hymns, as the great flag of Old
Mexico floats up the flag-pole in the bare
little plaza of shabby Las Uvas. The sun
over Pine Mountain greets the eagle of
Montezuma before it touches the vineyards
and the town, and the day begins with a
great shout. By and by there will be a
reading of the Declaration of Independ-
ence and an address punctured by vives ;
all the town in its best dress, and some ex-
hibits of horsemanship that make lathered
bits and bloodly spurs ; also a cock-fight.

By night there will be dancing, and such
music ! old Santos to play the* flute, a little
lean man with a saintly countenance, young
Garcia whose guitar has a soul, and Car-
rasco with the violin. They sit on a high
platform above the dancers in the candle
276

BY NIGHT THERE WILL BE DANCING

THE LITTLE TOWN OF THE GRAPE VINES

flare, backed by the red, white, and green of
Old Mexico, and play fervently such music
as you will not hear otherwhere.

At midnight the flag comes down. Count
yourself at a loss if you are not moved by
that performance. Pine Mountain watches
whitely overhead, shepherd fires glow
strongly on the glooming hills. The plaza,
the bare glistening pole, the dark folk, the
bright dresses, are lit ruddily by a bonfire.
It leaps up to the eagle flag, dies down, the
music begins softly and aside. They play
airs of old longing and exile ; slowly out of
the dark the flag drops down, bellying and
falling with the midnight draught. Some-
times a hymn is sung, always there are
tears. The flag is down ; Tony Sevadra
has received it in his arms. The music
strikes a barbaric swelling tune, another
flag begins a slow ascent, — it takes a
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THE LITTLE TOWN OF THE GRAPE VINES

breath or two to realize that they are both,
flag and tune, the Star Spangled Banner,
— a volley is fired, we are back, if you
please, in California of America. Every
youth who has the blood of patriots in him
lays ahold on Tony Sevadra's flag, happiest
if he can get a corner of it. The music
goes before, the folk fall in two and two,
singing. They sing everything, America,
the Marseillaise, for the sake of the French
shepherds hereabout, the hymn of Cuba,
and the Chilian national air to comfort
two families of that land. The flag goes
to Dona Ina's, with the candlesticks and
the altar cloths, then Las Uvas eats tamales
and dances the sun up the slope of Pine
Mountain.

You are not to suppose that they do not
keep the Fourth, Washington's Birthday,
and Thanksgiving at the town of the grape
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THE LITTLE TOWN OF THE GRAPE VINES

vines. These make excellent occasions
for quitting work and dancing, but the
Sixteenth is the holiday of the heart. On
Memorial Day the graves have garlands
and new pictures of the saints tacked to
the headboards. There is great virtue in
an Ave said in the Camp of the Saints.
I like that name which the Spanish speak-
ing people give to the garden of the dead,
Campo Santo, as if it might be some bed
of healing from which blind souls and
sinners rise up whole and praising God.
Sometimes the speech of simple folk hints
at truth the understanding does not reach.
I am persuaded only a complex soul can get
any good of a plain religion. Your earth-
born is a poet and a symbolist. We breed
in an environment of asphalt pavements
a body of people whose creeds are chiefly
restrictions against other people's way of
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THE LITTLE TOWN OF THE GRAPE VINES

life, and have kitchens and latrines under
the same roof that houses their God. Such
as these go to church to be edified, but at
Las Uvas they go for pure worship and to
entreat their God. The logical conclusion
of the faith that every good gift cometh
from God is the open hand and the finer
courtesy. The meal done without buys a
candle for the neighbor's dead child. . You
do foolishly to suppose that the candle does
no good.

At Las Uvas every house is a piece of
earth — thick walled, whitewashed adobe
that keeps the even temperature of a cave ;
every man is an accomplished horseman
and consequently bow-legged ; every family
keeps dogs, flea-bitten mongrels that loll
on the earthen floors. They speak a purer
Castilian than obtains in like villages of
Mexico, and the way they count relationship
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THE LITTLE TOWN OF THE GRAPE VINES

everybody is more or less akin. There is
not much villainy among them. What in-
centive to thieving or killing can there be
when there is little wealth and that to be
had for the borrowing ! If they love too
hotly, as we say " take their meat before
grace," so do their betters. Eh, what! shall
a man be a saint before he is dead ? And
besides, Holy Church takes it out of you
one way or another before all is done.
Come away, you who are obsessed with
your own importance in the scheme of
things, and have got nothing you did not
sweat for, come away by the brown valleys
and full-bosomed hills to the even-breathing
days, to the kindliness, earthiness, ease of
El Pueblo de Las Uvas.

Electrotyped and printed 6y H. O. Houghton & Co.
Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.